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The Columbia History of American Poetry
Parini, Jay.
Columbia University Press
0231078366
9780231078368
9780585041544
English
American poetry--History and criticism.
1993
PS303.C64 1993eb
811.009
American poetry--History and criticism.
cover
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The Columbia History of American Poetry
Jay Parini
Editor
Brett C. Millier
Associate Editor
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
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Columbia University Press
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congess Cataloging-in Publication Data
The Columbia history of American poetry / edited by Jay Parini.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-231-07836-6
1. American poetryHistory and criticism. I. Parini, Jay.
1993
PS303.C64
92-29399
811.009dc20
CIP
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are
Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
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Contents
Introduction
Jay Parini
ix
Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor
Francis Murphy
1
Early African American Poetry
Carolivia Herron
23
The Epic in the Nineteenth Century
John Mc Williams
33
Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism
Dana Gioia
64
The Transcendentalist Poets
Lawrence Buell
97
Emily Dickinson
Cynthia Griffin Wolff
121
Walt Whitman
Donald Pease
148
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Page vi
Edgar Allan Poe
Jeffrey Meyers
172
Lowell, Teasedale, Wylie, Millay, and Bogan
Jeanne Larsen
203
Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism
Margaret Dickie
233
Robert Frost and the Poetry of Survival
Jay Parini
260
Ezra Pound's Imagist Aesthetics: Lustra to Mauberley
J. T. Barbarese
284
T. S. Eliot
William Pritchard
319
Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop
Jeredith Merrin
343
Wallace Stevens
Helen Vendler
370
William Carlos Williams
Christopher MacGowan
395
Hart Crane's Difficult Passage
J. T. Barbarese
419
The Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance
Arnold Rampersad
452
Warren, with Ransom and Tate
Patricia Wallace
477
American Auden
Claude J. Summers
506
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The Twentieth-Century Long Poem
Lynn Keller
534
Public Music
W. S. Di Piero
564
Beat Poetry and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance
Ann Charters
581
John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and the Elegy
Lea Baechler
605
What Was Confessional Poetry?
Diane Wood Middlebrook
632
The Postconfessional Lyric
Gregory Orr
650
The Black Arts Poets
William W. Cook
674
Nature's Refrain in American Poetry
John Elder
707
Native American Poetry
Lucy Maddox
728
James Merrill and John Ashbery
John Shoptaw
750
The Visionary Poetics of Philip Levine and Charles Wright
Edward Hirsch
777
Contributors
807
Index
811
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Introduction
The relationship between poetry and national culture is always an intimate if troubled one, and to a large extent what American
poets have accomplished as a whole is a measure of what American culture itself has accomplished. One can track the evolution
of a national consciousness in the poems, as American poets, who begin as English Metaphysical poets abroad, gradually test
their own voices and learn ways to absorb and embody the visionthe outer and inner landscapeshat spread out before them.
As one might expect, the story of American poetry involves our struggle as a people to achieve a national identity.
"Nationalism," says an African character in a novel by Raymond Williams, "is in this sense like class. To have it, and to feel it,
is the only way to end it. If you fail to claim it, or give it up too soon, you will merely be cheated, by other classes and other
nations." In an essay called ''Nationalism: Irony and Commitment" (1990) Terry Eagleton notes that nationalism, like class,
inevitably involves an impossible irony. "It is sometimes forgotten," he writes, "that social class, for Karl Marx at least, is itself
a form of alienation, canceling the particularity of an individual life into collective anonymity." Marx separates himself from the
usual liberal view here in his notion that to undo this alienation one has to go, not around class, but through it. The same might
be said for nationalism: one must go through it, not around it, grasping all forms of national feeling (including alienation from
the nation state or the national mood or ethos of a particular time or region, as in the war protest poetry of the 1960s).
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The poet's job in such a context of national self-realization has always been to lay claim to a voice that reflects the genuineness
and separateness of a particular culture. The poets seize the given day, giving a "local habitation and a name" to what otherwise
remains inductableever more alien. While the ultimate goal, as Eagleton would argue, is to go "through" to some point beyond
nationalism, to create a poetry reflecting not an "American" consciousness but something like a "human" consciousness, we
must still go through every stage of nationalism as a culture, feel each stage fully, in order to transcend them.
Adrienne Rich, one of our most essential contemporary poets, has written about what she calls "the dream of a common
language." In her terms this dream is deeply feminist, involving "women's struggle to name the world." She says, movingly, that
"a whole new poetry is beginning here" in a poem called "Transcendental Etude." Although Rich might well object, I would
generalize from these observations to suggest that in fact the struggle of American poetry from the beginning has been this
dream of a common language, and that there has always been in our best poets a sense that a ''whole new poetry is beginning
here."
The Columbia History of American Poetry offers a fresh testament to this "whole new poetry." While poets in this country have
been far removed from the most visible centers of political and even cultural power, their poems have consistently taken the
measure of the culture as a whole. They have done so in remarkably different ways (although one might argue that superficial
differences of style are as not as important as underlying drives and motives reflected in striking thematic consistencies).
As a quick perusal of this text will suggest, the stylistic range of American poetry is unusually broad. If anything, one hestitates
even to refer to "an American style in poetry." A poet like Edward Taylor, for instance, looks very like an English Metaphysical
poet of the seventeenth century "gone native," while many of our early African American poets seem to belong to the traditions
of oral poetry that have roots in a variety of West African tribal cultures. More recently one can hardly imagine poets with
styles as different as James Merrill and John Ashbery. Nevertheless, as so many of the chapters in this book suggest, the wish to
speak for the American people at largefor them and to themis always present in the American poet: a brave and bold
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assumption that underlies each visionary project as it unfolds from Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley to Adrienne Rich,
Charles Wright, and Mary Oliver.
The reader will find in this collection a rich variety of responses to many different "traditions" of American poetry by some of
our strongest critics. These chapters are arranged chronologically, and represent what the editors consider important aspects of
American poetry. Nevertheless, each chapter should be taken as one critic's point of view: necessarily subjective, rooted in the
critic's position in the evolution of the culture as a whole. The reader will discover a considerable variety of critical methods in
this "history." The only thing we, as editors, have consistently discouraged is obscurity of language and the excessive use of
critical jargon.
The achievement of two of our most well-known Puritan poets, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, is examined by Frank
Murphy. Bradstreet, he says, "wrote the best American poems on human love before the middle of the nineteenth century." He
finds "an openness in her writing that is directly related to her role as an understanding mother." Edward Taylor, her younger
contemporary, was an Englishman who came to America as a young man in the seventeenth century and remained an English
Metaphysical poet in temperament and style; his work recalls the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Quarles, and others. Like many of
the Metaphysical poets, he was also a clergyman, serving a parish in the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, until his
retirement in 1725, when he wrote the last of his brilliant "Preparatory Meditations.''
What is interesting is how important these early American poets, especially Bradstreet and Taylor, have been for twentiethcentury poets. John Berryman, in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, acknowledges his debt directly. Poets such as Sylvia Plath,
Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Stevensoneach of whom in different ways has confronted the issue of motherhood in her
workcan also be seen to have learned a great deal from their distant precursor. Poets as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Hart
Crane, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Lowell are in debt to Edward Tayloras Murphy suggestsfor the style of meditative
poetry that he brought to this continent from England and naturalized in his own powerful way.
One of the chief tasks of criticism in the past decades has been the recovery of lost traditions. Women and African Americans,
in partic-
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ular, have been occluded, pushed to the margins, forgotten. The reasons why this happened are complex and go beyond any
simple formulations involving patriarchy and racism, although these are certainly the places to begin. North America was, first,
a land of indigenous people turned imperial colony. A whole native population was "erased" in a collective act of genocide in
which millions of native people suffered and died. A further "colonization" took place when African slaves were forceably
brought to this country, and many more millions suffered and died. Meanwhile, poets workedat the center of the culture and in
the margins.
In her chapter on "Early African American Poetry" Carolivia Herron performs an act of cultural archaeology, reaching into the
margins for the origins of what has become one of our strongest "traditions." More specifically, she locates the origins of
contemporary African American "polyphonic poetry" in the lyrics attached to "field hollers, ring shouts, rudimentary work
songs, and songs of familial entertainment in the early colonies of the Americasin the North, in the South, and in the
Caribbean." She points to early African American lyric poets such as Lucy Terry, Phyllis Wheatley, and Jupiter Hammon, and
she discusses several epics by African American poets, such as "The Sentinel of Freedom'' by John Sella Martin, an apocalyptic
poem that prophesies a "second coming after the United States is swept clean from the corruption of slavery," and Moses by
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a popular abolitionist poet who turns Moses into a mulatto who "freely chooses to return to the
aid of his enslaved people." Moving from Lucy Terry through Wheatley, Hammon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances Harper, and
others, Herron notes: "The end of the immediate political requirements of the Civil War gave African American poets the
freedom to write on all human themes: racism and flowers, wars and love, lynching and childhood."
At the center of American poetry has been the obsession with the long poem: the poem equal in size, power, and scope to the
growing power of the nation state as a whole. John McWilliams and Lynn Keller each took upon themselves the formidable task
of confronting this American obsession. McWilliams examines the work of epic poets such as Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight,
Alfred Mitchell, and a dozen others, moving right up through Stephen Vincent Benét's once popular but now rarely
acknowledged narrative poem, John Brown's Body, a poem
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that addresses one of the critical moments in the history of the abolitionist movement. McWilliams wonders in the end if the
"disappearance of John Brown's Body from public view . . . suggests that a narrative verse epic will lose its impact whenever a
poet fabricates characters said to embody cultural legend."
Lynn Keller, in her answering chapter on the long poem in the twentieth century, argues that the "long poem is a centraleven
obsessiveform for twentieth-century American literature." She demonstrates the peculiarly "contestatory form" of the long poem
in this century, looking at the major Modernist attempts to create the long poem, such as Pound's Cantos and The Waste Land,
as well as some lesser known but no less powerful works, which include Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery and H.D.'s Helen in
Egypt. Keller's encyclopedic chapter takes the long poem right up to the present, looking at contemporary long poems by James
Merrill, A. R. Ammons, and others; she locates "several characteristics that typify the varied and experimental history of the
twentieth-century long poem: a liberating mixture of genres, an enlargement beyond the postromantic lyric's focus on a moment
of subjective experience, and an accompanying exploration of social and historical materials, often in service to a fresh
understanding of the self and its construction."
In the postcolonial era American poetry began to move in fresh directions, as the urge to overthrow the English political yoke
moved from the literal cancellation of British imperial power to an attempt to embody this freedom imaginatively in something
like a separate national voice. William Cullen Bryant was probably our first national poet in this sense; he published
Thanatopsis and Other Poems in 1921, and it was greatly prized by readers of poetry through the nineteenth and early twentieth
century as the first flowering of a distinctly American expression. One can still return to Bryant with pleasure, hearing in him
the first cadence of a truly national literature, one that would embody the American voice in all its grainy particularity.
The same may be said for John Greenleaf Whittier. As Jeffrey Meyers notes in his chapter on Edgar Allan Poe, "When Poe
came to maturity William Cullent Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier were the leading American poets." It is interesting to note
that Poe himself turned away from them, preferring instead the English Romantic poets. His Poems (1831) was an impressive
volume for a young man (Poe was
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twenty-two at the time, and this was already his third collection). This book signaled to the reading public an original genius,
one who would receive world acclaim, though Poe's early verse does not have the mesmerizing power of the poems included in
The Raven and Other Poems (1845). Ezra Pound, a founding father of Modernism, would eventually say that "no one who has
tried to write like Poe . . . has done anything good." Nevertheless, the impact of Poe has lingered, as Meyers observes: "His
extensive influence on later writers has been quite out of proportion to the extremely uneven quality of his hundred poems." He
locates the source of Poe's strength in his appeal to "basic feelings" and his natural gravitation toward "universal themes
common to everyone in every language: dreams, love, loss; grief, mourning, alienation; terror and insanity, disease and death."
Poe was immensely popular in his own time, and he remains so. This cannot be said for Henry Wadsworth Longellow, who
became the most widely admired poet of nineteenth-century America but whose work is now infrequently read and rarely
studied. Dana Gioia, however, makes a compelling case here for Longfellow as the most talented of the Fireside poets, a group
that includes Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Gioia looks in particular at Longfellow's narrative
poems: Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn
(18631873). "These were the poems that earned him a preeminent position among his contemporaries," Gioia writes. "They
were also the works most utterly rejected by Modernism." Much of Gioia's chapter is concerned with the issue of Longfellow in
the postmodern age, concluding that the task for American poetry is "not to reject Modernism, which was our poetry's greatest
period, but to correct its blindspots and biases." Furthermore, he argues, a "reevaluation of Longfellow will be an important part
of this enterprise."
For modern and postmodern poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman might be considered the most profoundly
generative voices. As poet, this is more true of Whitman than Emerson, yet Emerson has probably had more influence on
American thinking in general than anyone else. In an essay called "Emerson: The American Religion" (published in a collection
called Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism in 1982), Harold Bloom makes the case for Emerson's priority:
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The lengthened shadow of our American culture is Emerson's, and Emerson indeed saw everything in everything, and spoke
with the tongue of a daemon. His truest achievement was to invent the American religion. . . . Starting from Emerson we came
to where we are, and from that impasse, which he prophesied, we will go by a path that most likely he marked out also. The
mind of Emerson is the mind of America.
This "American religion" is self-reliance, not in any common sense but as reliance on the alien God within us. Bloom writes:
"Self-reliance . . . is the religion that celebrates and reveres what in the self is before the Creation, a whatness which from the
perspective of religious orthodoxy can only be the primal Abyss." In his chapter on Emerson and other poets of the
Transcendental movement Lawrence Buell examines Emerson's major poems carefully in relation to the gnostic urge toward
self-definition in the face of the abyss that Bloom cites. "More often than not," says Buell, "the development of the subjective
mood in Transcendentalist poetry expresses loss or lack of self-integration."
That vulnerability, for instance, is expressed in "Days," one of Emersons finest poems:
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forget my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
This memorable poem reenacts the Blakean myth of the fall into individuality, and thus frames what begins to emerge in
Emerson as a central conflict in American poetry: the self versus the abyss, a dialectic later characterized explicitly by Edward
Arlington Robinson in his poem "Man Against the Sky" and by Wallace Stevens in his "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
where he writes: "Soldier, there is a war between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night."
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Late in life, in the winter of 1866 Emerson noted in his journal that for every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts,I and the
Abyss." But his poetry from the first was a formal meditation on this crucial dialectic, and the work of fellow Transcendentalist
poets such as William Ellery Channing, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and Jones Very continues the Emersonian project of
working through this dialectic. For the most part, as Buell notes, the Transcendentalists preferred tight poetic forms, a sense of
what he calls "liberty-within-restraint," and he cites their influence on such later poets as Robinson, Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur.
In a startling conclusion Buell suggests a major revision of our notion of American poesis. He would review the whole of
American poetry in the light of what he calls "a transatlantic Anglophone community almost as interlinked in the nineteenth
century as in the High Modernist era." In his narrative of American poetic development he eschews "the autochthonous myth of
American poetic history that winds up dancing around a selective version of Whitman, fathered perhaps by an even more
selective version of Emerson." Transcendentalist poetry must not, Buell suggest, merely be seen as a "proto-Whitmanian
artifact.'' In effect, Transcendentalism becomes part and parcel of the larger movement from Puritan meditative poetry to Frost,
Moore, Bishop, and many of our best contemporary poets.
Even a cursory reading of the chapters gathered in this Columbia History will reveal the centrality of Whitman, who has been
and remains our most influential poet. We must all, as poets and readers of poetry, "make a pact," as Pound says, with Whitman,
and many books have been written about the attempts by some of our best poets to come to terms with Whitman's expansive
visionary challenge to posterity. Listen, for a moment, to Whitman's unmistakable voice:
As Adam early in the morning
Walking forth from the bower refresh'd with sleep,
Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.
This poem leads directly to the solitary singer by the sea in Wallace Stevens' majestic "Idea of Order at Key West" via Hart
Crane's invocation of Whitman in the "Cape Hatteras" section of The Bridge, where he writes:
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O Walt!Ascensions of thee hover in me now
As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed,
With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed!
Likewise, Theodore Roethke, in a moment of crisis in a late poem, calls out with piercing directness: "Be with me, Whitman,
maker of catalogues!" More recently, one hears the Whitmanian note vividly reborn in Mary Oliver's astonishing "When Death
Comes," where she considers what it will be like when one has stepped through the door of life into the eternal night of death:
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefor I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
One can hardly imagine our debt, as a culture, to Walt Whitman, who was able to summon a vision as defiantly idiosyncratic yet
as thoroughly central and representative as any in the history of our poetry. He did it in Leaves of Grass, his lifetime project,
which is discussed and alluded to by a dozen different critics in this book. And Whitman is the primary focus of Donald E.
Pease's chapter, which surveys the whole of this poet's career, moving chronologically through the major poems of Leaves of
Grass. Pease begins with Ezra Pound's famous homage to Whitman called "A Pact." In this poem Pound recognizes Whitman as
the true father of American poetry, the Poet who broke new ground and found a voice equal to the vast new continent that it
celebrated. Pease sees Whitman as a radical democrat whose inclusive vision of an American future repositions the Emersonian
dialectic as not just self versus the abyss but included versus excluded figures. He identifies the Whitmanian project as one that
cleverly absorbs, even appropriates, the reader in an ongoing and
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expansive dialectic in which the poet returns us, always, to the democratic principles on which this country was founded.
While the expansive Whitman responded to Emerson's call in one way, Emily Dickinson's response took another turn. In her
chapter on Dickinson Cynthia Griffin Wolff suggests that "Dickinson's unique turn upon Emerson's injunction that "the poet"
ought to be "representative'' was "to write as a woman in an explicitly domestic realm." Dickinson, the isolated spinster living in
her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, had none of Whitman's robust contact with the "real" world; she nevertheless felt
intensely, thought deeply, read widely, and managed to become our other central poet: a brilliant counterpoint to Whitman.
Indeed, each poet is incomparably enhanced by the presence of the other. Where Whitman proceeds by flinging his fire in every
direction, Dickinson's movement is ever inward, a centripetal motion that generates a poetry of compression and power. Her
compacted poems are bullets aimed straight at the heart, and they kill.
Dickinson has also been crucial in the development of an American consciousness from the viewpoint of women. She was able,
as Wolff says, "to exploit this issue of gender in a wide variety of ways." She constructs an image of the housewife as soldier,
for instance, one who "'mans' the front lines of our engagement with the forces of destruction." Chaos and dissolution underlie
Dickinson's fierce, intensely wrought lyrics, which splinter in the reader's eye. In this sense, she anticipates the painful darkness
of Modernist and postmodern poetry. There is indeed a natural line from Dickinson to Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Louise
Glück. The Emersonian dialectic between self and the abyss seems all but lost to the abyss much of the time in Dickinson, but
there are moments of rebellion, too. "Emily Dickinson espoused an openly rebellious attitude toward God and toward the various
forms of male authority that He epitomized," Wolff observes. She rightly places Dickinson in the direct line of major American
poets.
Many of the chapters in the book address issues that have been raised by feminist scholars in the past two decades. In her
chapter on women poets and the emergence of Modernism, for instance, Margaret Dickie examines the role of women in the
Modernist movement as not mere adjuncts to male poets but as innovaters themselves: "Simply inserting the women Modernists
into the movement . . . will not offer a better understanding of the women's work unless they are considered not as
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adjuncts to the men but as original experimenters on their own terms." The great male ModernistsEliot, Pound, Frost,
Stevenswere almost all political reactionaries, she points out. "The women," says Dickie, "were more radical in their sexual
choices as well as in their social and political views." She studies, in particular, the neglected yet profoundly experimental
poetry of Gertrude Stein as well as the poetry of H.D. and Marianne Moore.
Moore, again, is the subject of Jeredith Merrin's chapter, which compares her to Elizabeth Bishop in unconventional ways. To
consider Moore and Bishop as "subspecies of female American poet is," writes Merrin, "to persist in a kind of marginalization."
Merrin is more interested in identifying their individual poetic personalities and noting their impact on younger American poets.
Inevitably, she finds that these writers have something in common as "describers of nature and natural creatures," an aspect they
also have in common with many of the best poets this country has produced.
Jeanne Larsen treats an often bypassed group of women lyric poets from the first half of this century: Amy Lowell, Sara
Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan. These poets have in common, she argues, "passionate
expression of emotion, revelation of personal sensibility, apparent delicacy overlying sensuality and self-assertion, musicality
created by diction and cadence, a vigorous grace of form." Each of these women was unique and a compelling poet, but they
wrote without much of a sense of themselves as women except in the most conventional ways. Bogan, for instance, "straggled
with assimilated misogynist attitudes of her times." Like most women, she learned to read by reading against herself as a woman
and identifying with the presiding male subject in the text. But her struggle, like that of the other poets examined here,
eventually revealed to her "a profound awareness of [gender as a] molding force," one that shapes and transforms a woman's
experience of what is true. In a very real sense Bogan's work anticipates the work of contemporary women poets like Linda
Pastan and Margaret Atwood, the Canadian poet, novelist, and short story writer, both of whom have written movingly about
domestic life.
Literary historians love movementscatch-all terms in which a wide variety of poets can shelterbut there is something unsettling
about the use of such giant categories as Romanticism, Modernism, and postmodernism. Just as there were almost as many
varieties of
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romanticisms as there were romantics, it is also true of Modernism that each poet responded to this complex international
movement in his or her own way. One of the most visible poets of the early Modernist period was Vachel Lindsay, for instance.
In such poems as "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" and "The Congo," Lindsay created poems that were entertaining
as performance pieces, and they are still worth reading. But Lindsay's version of modern poetry, though ear-catching, proved a
cul-de-sac. It did not inspire the best younger poets of the day, and Lindsay remains a curiosity in the history of our poetry, no
more read than his slightly older contemporary Trumbull Stickney, whose poem "Mnemosyne" caught the imagination of many
readers in the late nineteenth century, with its haunting evocation of "the long sun-sweetened summer-days" of his boyhood.
The mainstream of American literary Modernism went in a different and often more esoteric direction; it included poets as
diverse as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane; they are each
treated at length in separate chapters in this book. J. T. Barbarese, himself a poet, considers Pound in relation to the Imagist
movement, which he, H.D., and Amy Lowell helped to found. The influence of this aesthetic, with its emphasis on "direct
treatment of the thing itself," can hardly be overestimated. Twentieth-century American poetry is largely image-centered, even
when there is an overarching narrative. There is an overriding concern with concretenessan emphasis, again, that has its origins
in Emerson, who argued consistently against abstraction in language.
Pound, of course, was a "difficult" poet who adored allusions. In many ways helike the Eliot of The Waste Landwrote a poetry
of quotation, drawing on world literature with the adventurousness of an amateur reader. Nothing daunted him, and it shows.
From his first early lyrics, which owe so much to the Greek lyric, through the famous imitations of Chinese poetry, found in
Cathay, and on through Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and the Cantos, Pound remained a teacher as much as a poet. The last work, a
multivolume project that continues to daunt readers of American poetry, is treated by several critics in this collection, including
Keller and poet W. S. DiPiero. (Barbarese's focus is early to mid-career Pound, though he does briefly discuss the Cantos.)
T. S. Eliot was among the most influential poets of all time, in part because of his extraordinary skills as a critic. In The Sacred
Wood (1920)
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and other volumes, he made a case for the kind of Modernism that interested him, creating a whole new vocabulary for poets
and critics that included phrases and terms like "the dissociation of sensibility," "objective correlatives," and "classicism." He
redrew the entire map of English and American poetry in a way that focused on Donne and the Metaphysicals, on Elizabethan
dramatists like Middleton and Ford, and downgraded Milton and the eighteenth century. He presided over the Modernist
moment like an archbishop, and one can hardly overestimate his influence (positive and negative) on two or three generations of
poets and critics. His own poems, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" through the Four Quartets, were buffed under an
avalanche of exegesis and commentary. William H. Pritchard sorts through this towering and intimidating career with great skill,
finding the human voice in the poetry. At the end of his chapter, he quotes a remarkably astute and prophetic comment by
Randall Jarrell:
Won't the future say to us in helpless astonishment: "But did you actually believe all these things about objective
correlatives, classicism, the tradition, applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he was one of the most
subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions,
obsessions? . . . But for you, of course, after the first few years, his poetry existed undersea, thousands of feet below that
deluge of exegesis, explication, source listing, scholarship, and criticism that overwhelmed it. And yet how bravely and
personally it survived, its eyes neither coral nor mother-of-pearl but plainly human, full of human anguish!
Pritchard notes: "The voice of that future has not yet been heard; we should keep listening for it."
My chapter on Robert Frost is largely an attempt to characterize the work itself, which is curiously elusive despite its famous
lucidity. Frost is a simple poet in many ways: the verbal surface is accessible and attractive, and there is little in the way of
complex allusion; these qualities brought to Frost and his poetry an unusually large and appreciative audience, which remains in
place a generation after his death. But this popularity has had its negative aspects, and Frost has long been underestimated as a
major lyric and narrative poet. This remains so in spite of the efforts of such critics as Randall Jarrell, Lionel Trilling, and
Richard Poirier to position him properly as a major Modernist poet. I consider Frost a poet of extraordinary force and vision
whose work addresses issues such as human loneliness, mortality, and the great
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Emersonian dialectic between the self and the abyss in profoundly original ways. My chapter is an attempt to define these issues
and point to the places in his large oeuvre where he achieves that "momentary stay against confusion" that he considered the
goal of his art.
Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, occupies the position of a genuinely difficult poet whose centrality and influence have
nevertheless become increasingly obvious since his death in 1955. Helen Vendler, who writes on Stevens here, has been crucial
in making this complex body of work available to readers. Stevens, in the robustly sensuous lyrics of Harmonium through such
collections as The Man with a Blue Guitar, Parts of a World, Transport to Summer, and The Auroras of Autumn, demonstrated
what Vendler calls "the importance of the metaphysical dimension in thought; of the symbolic dimension in both imagery and
poetic architecture; the importance of syntax to argument; the value of fable in lyric narrative." He was also able to negotiate
"the narrow no-man's-land between regular and free verse" better than any other modern poet except Eliot. Stevens, in his essays
as well as in poems about poetry such as "Of Modern Poetry" and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," made a case for "the
immense social importance of the imagination,'' an argument that Vendler says has "yet to be fully absorbed."
William Carlos Williams represents another direction that Modernism took. He disliked the fact that his old friend Ezra Pound
deserted the American scene and skipped off to Europe, and he relentlessly criticized what he considered the pompous
allusiveness and self-conscious difficulty he saw in the poetry of Pound and Eliot, preferring to write in what he called "the
American grain." Deeply influenced by Imagism, his poems are memorably concrete, and they conjure images as bright and
clear as any in our poetry. As Christopher MacGowan observes in his chapter on Williams, "The temporal isolation of the image
. . . allowed Williams to adopt a strategy common to much American literature." This strategy attempts to "expose and finally
discount the failures of the past to fulfill the full promise of the American landscape and the American self." This aspect of
Williams "reveals him as a quintessentially American exponent of Modernism, and marks his heritage with Whitman just as
much as their joint interest in technical innovation." Williams's career as poet stretched from 1909 until 1962, when his
magnificent last book, Pictures from
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Brueghel, was published. For most of these years, his work received less than its due from critics. Like Stevens, however, it has
only gained in influence and readership in the years since his death, and Williams's epic-length poem, Paterson, which was
published in five books from 1946 to 1958, is considered in some detail by MacGowan and also discussed by Lynn Keller.
Hart Crane was a leading poet of the second generation of Modernist poets; his work has much in common with Pound and
Eliot as well as Williams. As J. T Barbarse puts it: "In about one generation Hart Crane has moved from the position of a
reader's guilty pleasure to the James Dean of American poetry, with a legend built on a slim masterpiece, White Buildings, and
that romancing of Modernism, The Bridge." As a homosexual, Crane found life at the margins of American culture difficult, if
not impossible; he drowned himself in 1932 at the age of thirty-three. Nonetheless, his slim body of work has been the subject
of much debate. Critics such as Yvor Winters have seen Crane as nothing more than a warmed-over Whitman in Modernist
dress. The Bridge, in particular, owes so much to The Waste Land that it has been dismissed as derivative, while Crane's early
work is deeply romantic, almost antimodern. On the other hand, he has been wildly praised by some of our strongest critics and
fellow poets. Barbarese picks his way judiciously through this minefield in trying to ascertain Crane's consistently alluring if
uncertain achievement.
The 1920s was a decade of extraordinary creativity for many American writers, including African American writers, who for the
most part were not interested in the Modernist movement per se. A flowering of African American poetry known as the Harlem
Renaisssance occured during this period. In his chapter on this important movement Arnold Rampersad examines the term itself,
seeing it as a "metaphor for a movement that took place, with varying levels of intensity and success, in several parts of the
United States and even beyond." Focusing on such poets as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen,
James Weldon Johnson, Sterling A. Brown, Melvin Tolson, and Arna Bontemps, Rampersad suggests that these poetssome of
whom never published a single collection of verse"played a major roleperhaps the central rolein defining the spirit of the age."
Their work was published to great effect in such journals as the Crisis, the Messenger, and Opportunity, and it was anthologized
in James Weldon
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Johnson's widely read Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and Negro Poets and Their Poems, edited by Robert Kerlin and
published the following year. The poets included in these pages "laid the foundations for the creative representation of African
American social and cultural reality in the modern world," argues Rampersad. And all subsequent African American poets,
including those who were part of the Black Arts movement (discussed here by William C. Cook), owe a great deal to these
poets.
One of the crucial events in American poetry in the postmodern years was the emigration of W. H. Auden from England in
1939. Auden became an American citizen and he wrote a great deal of his best poetry while a resident here; in addition, his
poetry was extraordinarily influential in the immediate postwar years. Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill,
Richard Howard, and John Hollander can all trace crucial aspects of their work to Auden. Edward Mendelson, a critic of Auden,
calls him "the most inclusive poet of the twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful." Claude J.
Summers concurs in his chapter on Auden as an American poet, suggesting that "emigration permitted Auden to reorient himself
and his place in literary tradition. The break with England enabled him to abandon finally the fragmented visions of
Romanticism and Modernism that he had earlier espoused for the unified assumptions of Augustanism." Furthermore, "it
allowed him eventually to discard the rationalist tenets of liberal humanism for the faith of Christian existentialism.'' The
impressive variety and scope of Auden's later poetry is treated here in detail, and Summers concludes that the goal of Auden's
poetry is not visionary transport or political change (Auden once famously said that "poetry makes nothing happen") but "the
affirmation of an imperfect world."
At the tail end of High Modernism were the so-called Fugitives, a group of southern poets that includes John Crowe Ransom,
Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Patricia Wallace centers her chapter on Warren, who published his first poems in the 1923
and his last in 1989. The name Fugitives derives from a magazine by that name published at Vanderbilt University from 1922 to
1925. Though associated in their own minds with the Modernist movement (they were all admirers of Eliot), the Fugitives
became the Agrarians by the time they published a collection of essays called I'll Take My Stand in 1930. As Wallace points out,
this collection is "a problematic volume." For a start, its
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assumptions about race are objectionable, and "its advocacy of a return to the land and to traditional values as a cure for
economic materialism was wildly off the point in 1930 for many who were hungry and unemployed." While Warren moved well
beyond the attitudes expressed in I'll Take My Stand, many of his contemporaries did not. Ransom, who wrote a handful of the
most gorgeously perfect poems in the whole of our language, suddenly stopped writing in mid-career; Tate was unable to fulfill
his early promise; only Warren was left, entering a major and immensely productive phase late in life. "The whole dynamic
career offers a model of ongoing creativity," Wallace argues, focusing on several of the later volumes. She points to Warren's
continuing influence on younger poets.
After the great Modernist poets, the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Auden and Warren, one enters the difficult zone of
postwar and contemporary poetry. It is notoriously hard to assess one's contemporaries. Anyone who troubles to leaf through old
anthologies of American verse will be stunned by how few names are recognizable. What ever became of Richard Henry
Stoddard, T. W. Parsons, William Allen Buffer, Alice Cary, or Joaquin Millereach of whom once had a large following? The
answer is all too obvious. Tastes shift, and what looks to one generation like "major poetry" often reads like doggerel to the
next.
There is a special problem in assessing poets who belong to no recognizable "school" or movement, e. e. cummings, for
instance, was immensely productive and popular for many decades in this century, and his work still has admiring readers. It is
easily recognizable for its typographical odditya surface experimentalism that belies the highly conventional, often sentimental,
romanticism of the poetry's content. Another poet difficult to categorize is Conrad Aiken, a contemporary of T. S. Eliot. He was
a rigorous, even brilliant, formalist whose best work, embodied in Preludes for Memnon (1931), is utterly sui generis. Richard
Eberhart is another anomoly: a poet whose best work was written in the late thirties and forties, he is best known for a handful
of early poems, "The Groundhog," "For a Lamb,'' and "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment." Although his production over six
decades has been enormous, his work is desperately uneven and has never attracted much in the way of sustained critical
treatment. Yvor Winters and J. V. Cunningham also flourished in the immediate postwar years, advocating
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"discursive" poetrypoems that made an argumentbut their work, too, has been hard to place, and it has largely been ignored
(though Robert Pinsky, a fine contemporary poet-critic, has paid homage to Winters in his essays and poems).
One of the most prominent groups of writers of the immediate postwar decade were the Beat poets, who have maintained a large
and appreciative audience of readers. As Ann Charters says: "The terms Beat poetry and the San Francisco Poetry Renaisssance
refer to two different literary movments created by two loosely associated groups of writers in New York City and San Francisco
who first gained a national audience for their work in the mid-1950s." Some of the more prominent members of these linked
movements were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Diane DiPrima, and
Michael McClure. What these poets share, in addition to a certain time frame and geographical focus, is a jazzy rebelliousness
that harks back to Walt Whitman as a poetic father.
The Beat movement can be seen as a response to the restrictive atmosphere of the cold war and, more generally, the postwar
emphasis on conforming to certain "traditional" values. Charters writes: "The Beats were determined to put the idealism of the
American dream of individual freedom to its ultimate test." The central poetry text of this movement, treated by Keller as well as
Charters, is Ginsberg's monumental Howl (1956), which was seized by U.S. Customs in San Francisco with the charge of
obscenity. Its opening lines still echo down the corridors of the American mind:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix
Howl effectively reopened the vein of bardic poetry.
Two poets who are often rather misidentified as confessional poets are Theodore Roethke and John Berryman. They are both
poets of ecstasy, and both owe a great deal to the traditions of American Romanticism that Emerson and Whitman set in motion.
Roethke was able to absorb various streams of English and American verse, and aspects of his poetry reflect a close reading of
Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Donne, and the Elizabethan lyricists. Yet a personal voice does emerge
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that is both musical and compelling. Roethke was essentially a lyricist, andas Lea Baechler arguesan elegist. John Berryman was
his exact contemporary, and he shared with Roethke an obsession with elegy. Both were poets of memory who explored the
fragile mental realms of childhood with great delicacy and fervor; both were traditionalists who played with a range of
conventional formsBerryman favoring openended, fragmentary poems, Roethke preferring an almost grandiloquent sense of
closure. The two poets are rarely studied together, but there is much to be said for this approach. "Read against each other,"
Baechler says, "they richly inform our own relation to loss, grief, and the work of mourning, together widening and articulating
the ecstatic and terrifying territory of the 'psyche under stress.'"
Diane Wood Middlebrook's focus is on the confessional poets. She writes: "Confessional poetry was not overtly political, but it
participated in the protest against Impersonality as a poetic value by reinstating an insistently autobiographical first person
engaged in resistance to postwar social norms and the pressure to conform." This poetry is centered on family life, probing for
the points of pressure between parents and children in particular. Among the major collections of verse that Middlebrook
discusses are Robert Lowell's ground-breaking Life Studies, W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle, Anne Sextons To Bedlam and
Part Way Back and All My Pretty Ones, and Sylvia Plath's Arielall books that belong to the late fifties and early sixties. Like
Auden, these poets saw anxiety as the primary condition of the postwar era. But, unlike Auden, they refused to fall back upon
religious faith and "the tradition." Each in his or her turn tried psychotherapy and each fell apart in different ways. What they
left behind, however, was a body of work of dazzling intensity and craft. ''Manifestly ordinary and accesssible," says
Middlebrook, "the images of the confessional poem encode the whole culture's shamemaking machinery." The influence of these
poets on such contemporaries as Adrienne Rich and others is palpable and ongoing.
Indeed, this influence is studied in detail by Gregory Orr, himself a postconfessional poet, in his chapter on the "poetry of self."
He sees the postconfessional mode as "a variant on the autobiographical dramatic lyric" that runs from Anne Bradstreet through
Louise Glück. In a wide-ranging study he identifies three generations of postconfessionals. The first includes Randall Jarrell,
Stanley Kunitz, and Elizabeth Bishop; the second, James Wright, Philip Levine, and Adrienne Rich; the
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thirda very contemporary groupincludes Orr himself, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds. He notes: "Using a variety
of literary and psychological strategies, the youngest generation has assimilated the autobiographical encounter into the
mainstream of American poetry to such an extent that, thirty years after the confessionals, it is one of the dominant modes of
writing."
In a chapter called "Public Music," W. S. DiPiero argues against "the intense personalism of American poetry in recent decades,
with its psychological fussiness and maniacally modest self-absorption," which he sees as "a sign of the failure of belief in the
possiblitity of poetry as a truly public music." His examples of poets who still believe in this public music are George Oppen
and Thomas McGrath, whom he traces back through Ezra Pound and the oral music of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. "The oral
poetry of the Hopi prayers, chants, and stories," he writes, is ''fused to political observance, political insofar as the social
collective can continue to cohere, can keep from going crazy, only if the rituals are observed." He sees the project of Pound's
Cantos in a similar light: "The encyclopedic didactic procedures of the Cantos convince me that Pound wanted his poem to be a
political stabilizer as poetry had been in antiquity." And he finds the true inheritors of Pound in the excommunist poets McGrath
and Oppen, both of whom eventually saw poetry as a public space where "public music" could be heard, despite the hard truth
and perhaps irreconcilable truth that a "useful poetic language, however much evolved from tradition, is essentially an idiolect,
and that sets poets apart from the crowd for whom or toward whom they write."
The Harlem Renaissance, Beat poetry, and the quest for "public speech" are transmogrified in unexpected ways in the Black
Arts movement of the late sixties and early seventies. The leading poet of this movement was LeRoi Jones, who later changed
his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. William C. Cook examines the work of Baraka in some detail in his essay here, looking as
well at Gwendolyn Brooks, Don Lee (also called Haki R. Madhubuti), Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni. His goal is to focus
on each poet "at the moment when the contours and dimensions of that poet were being established." These poets forged a
distinctly African American aesthetic, which, unlike that of the poets of the Harlem Renaisssance, did not owe much to the
familiar traditions of American and English poetry. It was original and fiery, at once
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politically challenging and formally vexing. As Donald Gibson argues in his introduction to Modern Black Poets (1973), "Never
before has there been any significant body of literature by black writers so closely resembling a unique black literature."
Lucy Maddox discusses Native American poetry, which (along with Chicano and Asian American poetry) has emerged as one of
the richest of contemporary veins. She notes: "The cultural traditions in which Native American poetry are still grounded are the
oldest indigenous traditions in North America; at the same time, Native American poetry itself is, in the strictest sense, almost
entirely a twentieth-century phenomenon." While she points to the origins of this poetry in such writers as John Rollin Ridge,
the mid-nineteenth-century Cherokee writer, as well as such early twentieth-century Native American poets as Emily Pauline
Johnson and Lynn Riggs, she focuses on such contemporary poets as Carroll Arnett, Duane Niatum, Simon Ortiz, James Welch,
Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, Ray Young Bear, and Louise Erdrich. Maddox writes: "The particular histories to which this poetry
bears eloquent witness have for too long been obscured."
An important feature of the Native American tradition is the sense of the earth as sacred ground. John Elder explores this strain
in his chapter on American nature poetry. Beginning his essayistic journey with Robert Frost and concluding with Louise
Erdrich (by way of Bradstreet, Whitman, Stevens, Ammons, Jeffers, Snyder, and others), he locates a "central impulse" in
American poetry, a "desire to regain intimacy with the earth." He finds a pattern of "therapeutic simplification and regrounding"
in this tradition, and he celebrates this "grounded circuit of separation and recovery." Elder also discusses the response of
American poets to the ''degradation of the natural environment." He sees the poet's task in this age of global catastrophe "as one
of creative grieving," and discovers in some of our best contemporary writers "a poetry of identification with the wounded
biosphere whose violation we have carried out ourselves." He concludes with a reading of a poem by Louise Erdrich in which he
finds "a circuit of return, and of patient encounter with the earth."
Two final chapters focus on four contemporary poets who represent some of the divergent paths our poets have taken in recent
years. As I have already suggested, the most difficult part of any survey of American poetry (or the poetry of any nation) comes
when the current scene
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is invoked. One might have, for instance, chosen Adrienne Rich as worthy subject for extensive treatment. Certainly her work is
impressive in both range and quality, and it might easily be argued that she is the central poet at work in America today. From
her early, highly formal poems to the looser forms of the more recent work, Rich has contributed as much as any poet to the
ongoing tradition of American poetry, that "search for a common language" she has so movingly described. And the selfconsciously political nature of her work has given an urgency to her voice in all ways striking. On the other hand, one might
have chosen any number of other poets who are still in midcareer: John Hollander, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Nancy Willard,
Galway Kinnell, Robin Morgan, Richard Howard, Robert Pack, Louise Glück, Louis Simpson, Donald Justice, Nikki Giovanni,
Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, Carolyn Kizer, Marilyn Hacker, Anthony Hecht, and
Anne Stevenson would all have been fine candidates for study. Because of their visibility and influence, John Ashbery and
James Merrill were chosen as representatives of their generation. John Shoptaw offers a fresh reading of the work of these poets.
As he notes, "Though Merrill's and Ashbery's primary poetic antecedentsStevens, Auden, and Bishopare nearly identical, their
descendants hardly recognize each other." He explores the singular paths each has taken toward a complete, self-contained
aesthetic.
The final chapter, centered on Philip Levine and Charles Wright, examines the work of two poets who have more recently
"arrived" as major voices in the culture, although both have been influential among contemporary poets for the last two decades.
Edward Hirsch, himself an award-winning poet, examines what he calls "the visionary poetics" of Levine and Wright. Hirsch
writes, "Levine and Wright take fundamentally different stances toward human reality in their work." Levine, for instance, is a
poet whose earth-centered work and concern for social justice harks back to Whitman and Williams, while Charles Wright is a
mystical visionary whose ancestry includes Dickinson, Dante, Pound, and the Chinese poets of the T'ang Dynasty. What both of
these poets share is a tactile sense of the endlessly evolving American attempt to find a language adequate to the vast and
diverse landscape and people who inhabit these United States.
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"America is a poem in our eyes," says Emerson in his prophetic and endlessly generative essay, "The Poet," which might be
read as the first full attempt by one of our writers to incite a national literature into being. "The poet is the Namer or Languagemaker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and
not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary," Emerson continues. This call-to-thefuture has modulated, most recently, into Adrienne Rich's "struggle to name the world," into Philip Levine's harsh evocation of
men in Detroit working on the assembly line, into Charles Wright's passionate search for a language of redemption. The forms,
the styles, proliferate as we continue to discover a national consciouness: to have it, to feel it, in order to go through it. Exactly
where and how this nation will emerge in its postnational incarnation is something future poets and critics will have to confront.
I leave it, happily, to them.
JAY PARINI
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Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor
Like most literate English people American Puritans took a great deal of pleasure in reading and writing poetry. They marked
the course of history, gave thanks to public figures, learned their theology, examined their consciences, mourned the dead,
honored their loved ones, celebrated the creation, and translated the Bible in a variety of poetic forms. Puritans of every
occupationschoolmasters, housewives, ship captains, and lawyerstried their hands at making verse, although given the
seventeenth-century preference for a literature that combined learning with wit it is not surprising that the educated clergyman,
trained in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, was more adept at it.
In his often quoted guide to young ministers (Manuductio ad Ministerium, 1726) the learned Boston divine Cotton Mather
shuddered at the thought of New England clergy reading the pagan Homer ("one of the greatest apostles the devil ever had in
the world"); nevertheless he had to admit that Homer's example of an invocation uttered as a "preface unto all important
enterprizes" could serve as a useful model for the seminary student, and that the Latin of Virgil, especially in his Georgics, "will
furnish you with many things far from despicable."
Though some have had a soul so unmusical, that they have decried all verse as being but a mere playing and fiddling upon
words; all versifying as if it were a more unnatural thing than if we should choose dancing instead of walking, and rhyme
as if it were but a sort of moresco-dancing with bells, yet I cannot wish you a soul that shall be wholly unpoetical.
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At the same time, and with serious consequences for the kind of poetry Harvard graduates would write, Mather cautioned that
while making "a little recreation of poetry in the midst of your painful studies" was a good thing, the wise student will withhold
his "throat from thirst" and beware the temptation to "be always pouring on the passionate and measured pages." Above all, he
warned the student reading Ovid to take care not to be sensually aroused and find himself conversing with "muses" no better
"than harlots.'' Mather concluded his essay with an appeal for calm in the current debate between the plain and learned style,
arguing that Christian gentlemen indulge one another in matters of taste and, at the same time, letting his readers know that as
far as he was concerned, the real "excellency of a book will never lie in the saying of little," nor will it be more valuable
because it shuns "erudition." Mather's own rather clumsy efforts at verse (his best poem was written following the death of
seven young ministers), reminds us that the passionate amateur, full of good intentions but not totally committed to his craft,
does not produce lines that breathe. Some Harvard students were content to copy lines from Shakespeare and Herrick in their
diaries, and it was probably just as well. Fortunately, two Puritan poets took their art more seriously.
Both spent their formative years in England. Anne Bradstreet (c. 16121672) was the second of six children born to Thomas
Dudley and Dorothy Yorke. We know very little about her mother, but her father's career as manager of the estate of the Earl of
Lincoln and, later, as governor of Massachusetts four times and thirteen times deputy governor, is well documented. He came to
America in 1630 aboard the flagship Arbella as one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His daughter and her
husband, Simon Bradstreet, were with him. Together they established formidable households, with both men well trained in
business and law. Simon was himself to serve as secretary to the colony and governor for ten years. Thomas Dudley was
something of a poet and, for this period, unusual in his encouragement of his daughter's literary appetite. It seems fitting that she
should dedicate her most ambitious literary effort (her "Ouaternions," or poems on groups of four: the four elements, the four
humors, the four ages of man, the four seasons of the year, and the four monarchiesthe Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and
the Roman) to him. In her dedication she acknowledges her debt to the
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example of Guillaume Du Bartas (a writer now almost forgotten, but whose Divine Weeks as translated by Joshua Sylvester in
1641 was one of the most popular poems in seventeenth-century England) as her model, but she hopes her father will recognize
his daughter's particular voice in that crowd of voices which constitutes the music of any beginning poet's work:
I honor him, but dare not wear his wealth,
My goods are true (though poor), I love no stealth,
But if I did, I durst not send them you,
Who must reward a thief, but with his due.
I shall not need my innocence to clear,
These ragged lines will do't, when they appear.
On what they are, your mild aspect I crave,
Accept my best, my worst vouchsafe a grave.
("To Her Most Honored Father")
When Bradstreet wrote these lines she must have done so with some future publication in mind. She shared her poems with
friends and relatives and was sensitive to the fact that her reputation as wife and mother and slave to the Muses was the subject
of gossip. It is characteristic of her in "The Prologue" to these poems to handle this criticism with forthrightness and a
determination to proceed with her writing.
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.
Bradstreet's brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge, decided, without Bradstreet's permission, to let New England audiences
determine this matter for themselves. On a trip to London in 1647 he brought with him a manuscript including thirteen
Bradstreet poems. They were published in 1650 by Stephen Bowtell "at the sign of the Bible in Popes Head-Alley," and entitled
The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America, written "By a Gentlewoman in those parts." Bradstreet's name first appears at the
close of the dedicatory poem to her father. The poems have rarely been out of the public eye since. Bradstreet said the book's
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publication caught her by surprise and made her "blush." By the year 1666 she was anticipating a new edition:
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed flay face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
("The Author to her Book")
No manuscript exists, but the publication by John Foster of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1678 of Several Poems "By a
Gentlewoman in New England . . . Corrected by the Author and enlarged by an Addition of several other Poems found amongst
her Papers after her Death," clearly represents our first genuine poet at her best. Most of the poems she added to The Tenth
Muse"Contemplations," "The Flesh and the Spirit," "Before the Birth of one of her Children," and three poems on her
grandchildren, for exampleare those works upon which Anne Bradstreet's present literary reputation rests. For, in contrast to the
ingenious and often gnarled efforts of her male contemporaries, she speaks artfully but directly from her pages:
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches of the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
("To My Dear and Loving Husband")
"Contemplations" remains her best long poem. It is a work full of the wonder of the creation:
Under the cooling shadow of a stately elm
Close sat I by a goodly river's side,
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Where gliding streams the rocks did overwhelm,
A lonely place, with pleasures dignified.
I once that loved the shady woods so well,
Now thought the rivers did the trees excel,
And if the sun would ever shine, there would I dwell.
For all the attraction of the landscape, however, Bradstreet is no romantic. There is nothing in her poems to give Cotton Mather
pause. She knows that winter always follows summer and age takes its toll of beauty. What makes the poem so pleasing is the
way in which the reader, like the writer, takes the lureonly to get caught:
Silent alone, where none or saw, or heard,
In pathless paths I lead my wand'ring feet,
My humble eyes to lofty skies I reared
To sing some song, my mazed Muse thought meet.
My great Creator I would magnify,
That nature had thus decked liberally,
But Ah, and Ah, again, my imbecility!
What she had forgotten is the petty reward of the temporal when viewed in eternity's perspective. Knowing the conventions of
Renaissance moral verse, one might have anticipated the turn of her ending without having anticipated the power of her last
lines and the striking use she makes of Biblical allusion:
O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in th' dust,
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape time's rust;
But he whose name in grayed in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.
In 1867 John Harvard Ellis published The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse. In doing so he provided modern
readers with not only Bradstreet's "Meditations when my Soul hath been refreshed with the Consolations which the world knows
not," but a remarkable spiritual autobiography addressed to her "dear children":
This Book by Any yet unread,
I leave for you when I am dead,
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That being gone, here you may find
What was your living mother's mind.
Puritan men and women were in the habit of keeping diaries and making notes on their spiritual histories, but those that survive
are often predictable and confess nothing more alarming than disobedience to their parents. Bradstreet's is notable for her frank
confession that although she has "sometimes tasted of that hidden manna that the world knows not," she has just as often been
perplexed because her spiritual pilgrimage has not been one of "constant joy." Instead, there have been "times of sinkings and
droopings"; she has doubted the truth of the Scriptures and wondered "whether there was a God." ''I never saw any miracles to
confirm me," she adds, "and those which I read of how did [I] know but they were feigned." It seems fitting that she finally
settled on a poet's rather than a theologian's way of resolving her doubts.
That there is a God my reason would soon tell me by the wondrous works that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth,
the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon
the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end.
Puritans were not indifferent to the things of this world. Some of the most eloquent passages about the American landscape can
be found in the writings of Samuel Sewall and Jonathan Edwards. But Puritan men and women were constantly reminded of the
difference between this fleeting world and the city of heavenly light:
The city where I hope to dwell,
There's none on earth can parallel;
The stately walls both high and strong,
Are made of precious jasper stone;
The gates of pearl, both rich and clear,
And angels are for porters there;
The streets thereof transparent gold,
Such as no eye did e'er behold;
A crystal river there doth run,
Which doth proceed from the Lamb's throne.
("The Flesh and the Spirit")
Yet knowing something intellectually and living it are two quite different things. Bradstreet's poetry is attractive to us because
she is so honest
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about her affections. Her ultimate love is for Christ"upon this rock Christ Jesus will I build my faith, and if I perish, I perish"but
the here and now has its charms. In her delight in her marriage, in the sadness that followed the burning of her house, in the
rewards of parenting, and in the heartbreaking loss of children she explores a tension between this world and the next that
transcends the age in which she lived.
Edward Taylor (c. 16421729) was thirty years younger than Anne Bradstreet and arrived in Boston just four years before her
death. Given his impressive social connections (his reputation as a Nonconforming student and teacher preceded him), he could
have met the Andover poet, but it seems unlikely. He did, however, acquire a copy of Several Poems and added it to his
remarkable library. Because Taylor's place in American literature is so assured, it is curious that so little has been discovered
concerning his English years. Incomplete parish and university records have contributed to the mystery. What is known is that
he was born in Sketchley (Burbage parish), Leicestershire County, England, during the civil wars. His father was a prosperous
farmer, and years later Taylor would apply lessons learned as a boy to the soil of western Massachusetts. His familiarity with
the vocabulary of the weaving trade suggests that he may have worked in a nearby shop at Hinckley. Leicestershire County was
sympathetic to church dissidents and Taylor's contempt for all things Anglican was probably encouraged by the curriculum of
the local schools. With obvious consequences for his poetry both early and late, he read Calvin and Augustine, learned Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew, and examined exegetical texts on Job and the Canticles (or Songs of Solomon). Leicestershire schools also
encouraged the study of poets like Francis Quarles and George Herbert (the least Anglican of Anglicans), and so it is that unlike
Bradstreet, who modeled her music on the mellifluent measures of Sidney and Spenser, Taylor preferred the more dissonant
music of the metaphysical poets, where the erudite and the colloquial, the languages of theology and farming commingled in a
verse full of surprises, delighting in puns and paradoxes. Taylor would have been happy teaching in country schools just like the
one he attended, but the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and difficult times for Nonconformists that followed served as an
impetus to leave England and start life anew. After three years of study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Taylor accepted a call to
become the minister to the frontier town of Westfield, one hundred miles west of Harvard Yard. There he remained for the next
fifty-eight years, serving as minister, physician, and public servant with great distinction.
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The last of his "Preparatory Meditations" is dated 1725, the year of his retirement.
Taylor was not unknown as a poet to his contemporaries. In 1689 Cotton Mather published two stanzas of "Upon Wedlock and
Death of Children," and, later, family geneologists and historians noted that he wrote verse. But it was not until Thomas H.
Johnson published a sample of Taylor's work in 1937 that the world knew of the existence of a remarkable body of Puritan
poetry. Johnson had been working on lives of Harvard graduates and read in John Sibley's collection of biographical sketches
(1885) a brief description of Taylor's poetry. He tracked the manuscript book down and discovered it in the Yale University
Library, where it had been deposited by a Taylor descendant in 1883. Johnson published a fuller selection of Taylor's work in
1939, but it was only with the publication of The Poems of Edward Taylor, edited by Donald E. Stanford in 1960, that the full
commitment of Taylor to the act of writing poetry was revealed. The Johnson and Stanford editions of Edward Taylor did much
to revise our notions of Puritans and their attitudes toward art.
Early on in Taylor criticism some mistakes were made. Family tradition perpetuated a notion that Taylor had forbidden the
publication of his verse and had left instructions in his will to this effect. Furthermore, the poetry seemed too sensuous, its
imagery too abundant, its tone too playful and intimate to fit the stereotype of Puritan verse. It was not uncommon to find critics
hinting that Taylor was secretely Anglican in sympathy, paying too much attention to the sacrament of communion (or the
Lord's Supper as the Puritans would call it) and writing too much like Donne or Crashaw not to be an anomaly. Scholarship
written over the last forty years has changed all this. Taylor left no will, he died intestate, and when his relations with other
Connecticut Valley ministers were explored and his sermons published, it became clear that his orthodoxy was not only
unwavering, it could more accurately be described as inflexible to a fault. As to publication, the standard literary taste was
dictated by London, and Taylor's poems would have seemed a hundred years behind time in 1729.
The manuscript book "Poetical Works" does not contain all of Taylor's poetrythere is a hefty four hundred and thirty-eight-page
"Metrical History of Christianity," a kind of martyrology, at the Redwood Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, now
transcribed by Donald Stanford, for examplebut it contains all of Taylor's best work. In part
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it is a commonplace book, and the two Latin poems with which it begins are not by Taylor but by President Charles Chauncy of
Harvard, a friend of Taylor's, on the death of John Davenport, the great spiritual leader of the New Haven colony. Some of what
it includes by Taylor are elegies, acrostic poems, a letter to his wife, Elizabeth Fitch, a college declamation, a poem written on
the recovery of an illness in 1720, and an attack on a legendary female pope of the ninth century. All rather predictable
seventeenth-century subjects for a Congregational minister. The manuscript book is fully described in Stanford. For present-day
readers of American poetry there are three treasures: a group of miscellaneous lyrics, a long poem called "Gods Determinations
touching his Elect: and the Elects Combat in their Conversion, and Coming up to God in Christ together with the Comfortable
Effects thereof," and an almost complete group of "Preparatory Meditations before my approach to the Lords Supper. Chiefly
upon the Doctrine preached upon the Day of Administration." Two hundred and seventeen meditations have survived, an
extraordinary effort at sustained verse writing in any period.
It was the opening lines to "The Preface" to Gods Determinations that first captured the imagination of Taylor's readers, and no
one who has written about him since has failed to quote them:
Infinity, when all things it beheld
In Nothing and of Nothing all did build,
Upon what Base was fixt the Lath, wherein
He turn'd this Globe, and riggalled it so trim? . . .
Who Lac'de and Fillitted the earth so fine,
With Rivers like green Ribbons Smaragdine? . . .
Who Spread its Canopy? Or Curtain's Spun?
Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?
Like Bradstreet, Taylor delights in God's creation, but the portrait here of God as craftsman, forger, architect, mason, and
embroiderer, and, most fetchingly, a player in the great bowling alley of the universe, is unique. Juxtaposed to this Great Giver
is ungrateful man, who disobeyed his Creator and forfeited Paradise in doing so. God, Taylor sighs,
Gave All to nothing Man indeed, whereby
Through nothing man all might him Glorify . . .
But Nothing man did throw down all by Sin:
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And darkened that lightsome Gem in him.
That now his brightest Diamond is grown
Darker by far than any Coalpit stone.
Of course, for the Puritan, this is just half the tale. Paradise lost and Paradise regained is at the heart of the Christian story. It's
the great subject of Michael Wigglesworth's "The Day of Doom" (1662), the most popular poem ever written in America, a
work Taylor's wife knew by heart. Most famous for the fire and brimstone passages describing the soul's suffering in hell, we
forget that this poem is as much about its ending as its beginning, describing the saints (for the Puritan, those believers who are
saved) happy in Christ's embrace:
For there the saints are perfect saints,
and holy ones indeed,
From all the sin that dwelt within
their mortal bodies freed:
Made kings and priests to God through Christ's
dear love's transcendency,
There to remain, and there to reign
with Him eternally.
Gods Determinations dramatizes the struggle between Satan and Christ over the lost sinner, and Taylor never lets his reader
forget the most extraordinary gift God gave him: the new Covenant of Faith that replaced the old Covenant of Works, broken by
Adam in his disobedience. The crucifixion is Christ's cost and promise that the gates of heaven are open to those who believe in
Him. Some of Taylor's finest lyric moments follow "The Souls groan to Christ for Succour," when Christ assures humanity that
the powerful creature Satan would have us take him for is really "broken tootht, and muzzled sure:"
Peace, Peace, my Honey, do not Cry,
My Little Darling, wipe thine eye,
Oh Cheer, Cheer up, come see.
Is anything too deare, my Dove,
Is anything too good, my Love
To get or give for thee?
God's Determinations ends as every Puritan might have known it would, with Christ triumphant; but the idea of all the saints
sharing a carriage and singing joyously on their journey toward heaven would have
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brought a smile to Taylor's contemporaries had they been able to read it:
In Heaven soaring up, I dropt an Eare
On Earth: and Oh! sweet Melody:
And listening, found it was the Saints who were
Encoacht for Heaven that sang for Joy.
For in Christs coach they sweetly sing;
As they to Glory ride therein.
("The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended")
Seventeenth-century poets working in a metaphysical tradition saw nothing incongruous about a poem dealing with salvation
taking its figures from everyday events like carriage rides; neither did Puritan historians mind expending their energies reading
ordinary eventsnone too small or insignificantas signs of God's will. When the governor of Massachusetts saw a snake and a
mouse in mortal combat, he was surprised to see the mouse emerge as victor, but his friend, Mr. Wilson, said it was a sign
guaranteeing the triumph of the New England experiment, all the evidence one needed to prove that New Englanders will
"overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." This is a habit of mind going back hundreds of years, and Taylor
makes ingenious use of it in watching a spider catching a fly, or a wasp chilled with cold coming to life in the sun, or thinking
how much the wavering Christian looks like someone trying to avoid getting wet by running between buildings:
Ye Flippering Soule,
Why dost between the Nippers dwell?
Not stay, nor goe. Not yet, nor yet Controle.
Doth this doe well?
Rise journy'ng when the skies fall weeping
showers
Not o're nor under th' Clouds and Cloudy
Powers.
("Let by Rain")
In these poems Taylor employs Elizabethan song forms, and with a little patience for counting syllables and some skill at noting
elision, the reader will see that this stanza has lines of 4, 8, 10, 4, 10 and 10 syllables, and this pattern is repeated in the stanzas
that follow. They could have been set to music but they weren't. Taylor's "Huswifery" is the most
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famous of these lyrics, Taylor is thinking about the process of making cloth, and, in particular, the garment that will be a mark
of salvation for the wearer. We know from his collection of sermons on the Lord's Supper that he has a passage from Matthew
(22:12) in mind. This is the story of the servant who invited all to attend a wedding feast but then turned away one he had earlier
urged to come: "And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?" For Taylor, the
proper garment reflects the condition of the soul:
Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory,
My words and actions, that their shine may fill
My wayes with glory and thee glorify.
Then mine apparell shall display before yee
That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.
Puritans preferred the phrase Lord's Supper to Anglican or Roman Catholic holy communion because they thought of this
sacrament as something to be shared. Communion could be taken by a priest in the privacy of a chapel; the Lord's Supper could
not. However; they did not believe it should be shared by all. The seventeenth-century English Puritan Thomas Manton
declared: "The [Biblical] word speaks to all promiscuously, as inviting; the sacraments to everyone in particular, as obliging
[i.e., contractual]." New England Congregationalists, until quite late, saw this sacrament (baptism was the only other sacrament
Puritan men and women celebrated) as denoting a particular mark of worthiness, to be received only by church members (not the
whole congregation) who testified that they had passed beyond a mere "historical understanding" of scripture to a heartfelt
"saving faith," an inner conviction of the message of Christ and a concomitant assurance of salvation. Of course, there was
always the possibility of false assurance; as a result, good Puritans, as Taylor put it, lived ''within doore," examining their
consciences, and preparing for their monthly participation in this holiest of rites by meditating on scripture. The observation of a
recent critic that Taylor's "Preparatory Meditations" are "distinctly non-Puritan," is quite wrong. We have no example of another
New England writer who chose to make his poetry a spiritual diary of his response to the gift of the Lord's Supper, but neither
the idea of meditation nor the language of Taylor's, poetry is inconsistent with Puritan devotional practice. We
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will never know whether his first meditation, dated July 23, 1682, continues a method to which he had long been accustomed or
represents an experimental beginning, but the fact that Taylor seems so immediately comfortable (if that's ever the word for a
poetry that is always straining) with his six-line iambic pentameter stanza and its unvarying rhyme scheme suggests some earlier
practice in the form. We do not have meditations for every month of the yearfar from itnor do we know exactly at what moment
he wrote his poem (i.e., before or after a sermon was delivered), but we may take him at his word that his poems were written
"chiefly" in response to the "Doctrine preached upon the Day of Administration" of a sacrament that was meant, as John Preston
put it in 1638, to "knit the knot stronger between Christ and us.''
The method of meditation that Taylor follows has a long tradition in devotional literature and always begins with the
dramatization of the Biblical text, known as the "composition of place," an exercise in which the penitent tries to realize, in the
most sensual way, the historical context in which the scriptural passage unfolds. What follows from this tuning up of the senses
is an intellectual exercise in which the doctrinal and moral consequences of the scriptural passage are explored. This is known as
an "examination of points." The final step in the meditative process is the most important one for students of Taylor's poetry, for
it is the end of all meditation: colloquy, talking with God, opening the door, as Richard Baxter has put it, "between head and
heart," speaking, as St. Ignatius Loyola advises, "just as one friend talks to another, or a servant to his master; now asking some
favor, now blaming himself for some ill deed, now disclosing his affairs and seeking counsel in them." Taylor's "Preparatory
Meditations" are hymns from the heart, outpourings in which the sinner, moved by or anticipating grace, lifts his voice in
thanksgiving.
No one of the 217 surviving meditations is representative of all. Some contemplate the old Covenant of Works and the new
Covenant of Faith ("Is Christ thy Advocate to plead thy Cause?"), some examine the speaker's weaknesses ("was ever Heart like
mine?/ A Sty of Filth, a Trough of Washing-Swill"), some contemplate Old Testament types as they are fulfilled in the New
Testament by the antitype Christ ("Art thou, Lord, Abrahams Seed and Issac too?"), while some, representing many years
wrestling with the Canticles, celebrate the soul's union with Christ:
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Lord! let thy Holy Spirit take my hand
And opening thy Graces garden doore
Lead mee into the Same that I well fann'd
May by thy Holy Spirit bee all ore
And make my Lungs thy golden Bagpipes right
Filld with this precious Aire, thy praises pipe.
("Meditation 129, Second Series")
These texts seem especially appropriate for meditations on a "love feast," to use Cotton Mather's phrase, and apt, too, for a
Puritan who would praise God in song. Taylor knows the limits of art, but he also is aware that ours is a "fortunate" Fall, and
that he is loved by a God who is generous and whose grace is free. This gives him the confidence to say:
Unite my Soule, Lord, to thyselfe, and stamp
Thy holy print on my unholy heart.
I'st nimble be when thou destroyst my cramp
And take thy paths when thy dost take my part.
If thou wilt blow this Oaten Straw of mine,
The sweetest piped praises shall be thine.
("Meditation 44, Second Series")
The metaphysical style that so appealed to Puritan poets came into disfavor long before the seventeenth century ended, and was
treated with contempt by most eighteenth-century critics. Its virtues were lost to American readers until Emerson and the New
England Transcendentalists discovered the poetry of Herbert. But in a literature given to self-scrutiny it is a style bound to play
a vital part, as the work of T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, and Amy Clampitt so
brilliantly attests.
Francis Murphy
Further Reading
Bradstreet, Anne. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. J. R. McElrath, Jr., and A. P. Robb. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Bradstreet, Anne. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
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Davis, Thomas M. and Virginia L. Edward Taylor's Minor Poetry. New York Twayne, 1981.
Grabo, Norman S. Edward Taylor. New York: Twayne, 1988.
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979.
Meserole, Harrison T. Seventeenth-Century American Poetry. New York Doubleday, 1968.
Morgan, Edmund S. Visible Saints. New York New York University Press, 1963.
Murdock, Kenneth B. Literature and Theology in Colonial New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949.
Piercy, Josephine Ketcham. Anne Bradstreet. New York: Twayne, 1965.
Rowe, Karen E. Saint and Singer: Edward Taylor's Typology and the Poetics of Meditation. New York Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Scheick, William J. The Will and the Word: The Poetry of Edward Taylor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974.
Stanford, Ann. Anne Bradstreet the Worldly Puritan. New York B. Franklin, 1974.
Taylor, Edward. The Poems of Edward Taylor. Ed. Donald E. Stanford. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
Wakefield, Gordon S. Puritan Devotion. London: Epworth Press, 1957.
White, Elizabeth Wade. Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse. New York Oxford University Press, 1971.
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Early African American Poetry
African American poetry began in the lyrics attached to field hollers, ring shouts, rudimentary work songs, and songs of familial
entertainment in the early colonies of the Americasin the North, South, and the Caribbean. These musical verses were
characterized by insistent call and and response patterns, complex African and neo-African polyrhythms, the adaptation of
European rhyme as a means of complexifying rhythm, and the transformation and incorporation of European harmonies into
distinctive chords, which were the forerunners of chords and lyrics that characterize the African American lyrical poetic genres
of gospel, blues, jazz, the mast, the chanted sermon, rhythm and blues, soul, rap, and contemporary polyphonic poetry. The
polyphonic poetry of such twentieth-century poets as Derek Walcott, E. Kamau Brathwaite, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Robert
Hayden, Ishmael Reed, Countee Cullen, Lorna Goodison, Langston Hughes, Jay Wright, Rita Dove, Ai, and Etheridge Knight all
reconstrue African rhythmic complexity with creative and personally distinctive transformations of Euro-American, African
American, Caribbean, Latin American, and Asian styles and motifs. The designation African American, while an appropriate
term for cultural identification, is yet another incomplete summary of a black people more accurately called the African-BritishEuropean-Native American-Asian peoples of the Americas.
Many early accounts of contact between Europeans and Africans in the Americas describe the facility with which Africans not
only creat-
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ed their own musical instruments to accompany poetry but also mastered and transformed the uses of European instruments in
the development of distinctively African American accompaniment to the oral poetry of black slaves. The begrudging and racist
compliments paid to these artistic slaves by their European observers cannot mask the prevalence of high skill in the
composition of rhythmic oral poetry by the slaves. In one Caribbean account from the early 1660s an Englishman expresses
acute astonishment when an African slave, denied the use of a European stringed instrument, makes one of better quality
himself, from which he develops music to accompany oral poetry, causing the Englishman to acknowledge that the black man is
human, and a genius at that.
Such descriptions are scant, and it is often difficult to filter a few reliable events from the heavy layering of racism in the
perceptions of the Europeans. Unfortunately, if contemporary descriptions of their lyric poetry by the Africans themselves
existed in oral or written form they are now lost to us except in the continued presence of the rhythms themselves in African
American culture. In addition, for several reasons the development of polyrhythmic African American poetry is difficult to trace
from colonial times to the 1920s, when scholars and others began to keep more complete records of overfly musical poetry.
There was not only the problem of racial prejudice in encouraging observers to ignore poetic accomplishments in oral
composition of Africans in the AmericasEuropean and American culture as a whole belittles the oral for the sake of the written,
and today not even the knowledge that the Homeric epics were composed orally is enough to convince an audience determined
to believe that written texts are more intelligent and artistic than oral ones. Oral texts are persistently characterized as "folk"
texts, that is to say, unaccomplished, as if human beings cease to be folk and become people once they write rather than speak
their poetry.
As a result of these narrow aesthetic principles it is more convenient to describe the development of African American poetry
through those written poetic works that evoke more obvious comparison with European and American poetry through formal
structure, theme, and diction. Such works are numerous, although they have received little attention throughout their history. In
spite of the fact that many have been published and recognized as poetry they have often been ignored by white and black
critics. Unlike the orally composed poems these written
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poems are usually not anonymous. In form these written, self-conscious poems rely upon Euro-American construction, although
they often incorporate aspects of African-influenced oral poetry, as in Maurice N. Corbett's The Harp of Ethiopia (1914), in
which the poet sets aside the regular iambic tetrameter rhythm and uses an irregular jazz rhythm in the section entitled "The
Harp Awaking." In other instances African American diction and vocabulary is blended with Euro-American poetic forms, and
one poem, De Cabin (1915), by Fenton Johnson, uses African American dialect in regular iambic pentameter blank verse.
Nineteenth-century African American formal poems thus are a continuum of poetic experiences with irregular relationships to
the oral or folk poetry of the African American people. The poems are more likely to reveal the race of the author through
theme rather than word choice. The late nineteenth century was a poetic battleground in which African American poets
demanded equality with whites by demonstrating equality in artistic achievement. The cultural world view then prevalent
insisted that all that was best in the white world was best for all. African Americans thus attempted to prove their facility in
aesthetic forms valued by whites, and neither African Americans nor whites insisted that art forms that were only black (e.g.,
blues, gospel, jazz) could have as high an aesthetic merit. The African American writers Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt,
for example, condemned blues poetry in their novels, although both were stalwart workers for racial equality and freedom.
World War I cracked this ethnocentric world view, so that, starting in the 1920s, African American poets took full freedom in
developing distinctive poetry with styles derived from Africa, African America, Europe, the Caribbean, North and South
America, and even Asia.
The earliest known formal written poem by an African American is "Bars Flight" by Lucy Terry (17301821) in 1746. The
twenty-eight-line poem recounts the fate of seven colonists attacked by Native Americans during a raid on Deerfield,
Massachusetts. The poem is in irregular iambic tetrameter verse in which the author relates the particular circumstances of death
or escape of her fellow villagersSamuel Allen, singled out as the most aggressive of the colonists, is kidnapped and carried away
by the raiders, John Saddler escapes across the waterand the largest number of verses are devoted to the one woman under
attack, Eunice Allen.
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Eunice Allen see the Indians comeing [sic],
And hoped to save herself by running,
And had not her petticoats stopt her,
The awful creatures had not cotched her,
And tommyhawked her on the head,
And left her on the ground for dead;
Lucy Terry was a slave of Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts until 1756, when she received her freedom and married
the free black, Abijah Prince. Her only poem was first published in 1895 in George Sheldon's A History of Deerfield,
Massachusetts. She was a vigorous woman, and fought an unsuccessful court battle, going all the way to the Supreme Court, to
have her son enrolled at Williams College.
Jupiter Hammon (1720?1806?), a slave to three generations of the New York Lloyd family, was the first African American poet
whose work was published in what was to become the United States. His poems: "An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ,
with Penetential Cries" (176061); "An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly" (1778); "An Essay on Ten Virgins" (1779, no copy
extant); ''A Poem for Children, with Thoughts on Death" (with a prose piece, "A Winter Place," 1782); and "An Evening's
Improvement," to which is appended "The Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant" (n.d.). Hammon's poetry reveals his strong
attachment to the Wesleyan Christian revival, and, on his own behalf and that of other slaves, including Phillis Wheatley, he
persistently gives thanks for having been brought into slavery for the higher purpose of becoming Christians. There is a subtle if
unintentional irony in Hammon's association of Christianity with freedom. In "An Evening Thought" he writes,
Dear Jesus, by the precious Blood
The World Redemption have:
Salvation now comes from the Lord,
He being they captive slave.
...........................
Ho! every one that hunger hath,
Or pineth after me,
Salvation be thy leading Staff,
To set the Sinner free.
Here the concepts of captivity and freedom are ambiguous enough to refer to the sinner's relationship with God as well as the
dave's rela-
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tionship with his master. In "The Kind Master" Hammon explicitly derives the obedience of the slave as a response to the slave's
observing the master's obedience to God.
Throughout the early history of slavery in the colonies and in the United States slave owners were divided as to whether
Christians could enslave other Christians, and African slaves were often denied access to Christian doctrine for fear such
doctrine would eliminate them as slaves. Phillis Wheatley (1753?1784) was certainly aware of the link between religious belief
and freedom in the three versions of her poem dedicated to George Whitefield. In the earliest version (1770) of this poem,
printed in broadside, Wheatley implies that Africans who become Christians must be set free.
Take HIM, ye Africans, he longs for you;
Impartial SAVIOUR, is his TITLE due;
If you will walk in Grace's heavenly Road,
He'll make you free, and Kings, and Priests to God.
The implication that Christianity could free African slaves evidently was highly unacceptable to Wheatley's slaveowning
audience, and in a broadside printed later that year the offensive statement was changed to read:
Take HIM, ye Africans, he longs for you;
Impartial SAVIOUR is his title due;
If you will chuse to walk in grace's road,
You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to GOD.
In the final version of the poem, published in Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (1773), the freedom and grace to
be accorded to African Christians is replaced, certainly through the insistence of her publisher, with suffering and blood.
"Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you,
"Impartial Saviour is his rifle due:
"Wash'd in the fountain of redeeming blood,
"You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God."
Wheatley's collection was the first book of poetry to be published by an African American and the second book by a woman
within what would become the United States. It was published as a result of her trip to England in 1773, a visit sponsored by the
Wheatley family to
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improve the health of Phillis, who was treated with exceptional consideration and pride by the Wheatley family. After the
publication of her book Wheatley lived as a free black, although her legal manumission papers have not been found. The
existence of a poetic black was so unbelievable in the colonial period that many of the colonial elders affixed their names to the
title page to authenticate Wheatley's achievement in poetry.
Wheatley, greatly influenced by Alexander Pope, wrote primarily in heroic couplets, although she relied on blank verse for her
poems on Harvard University, "To the University of Cambridge in New England" and "On Virtue," both of which show
Wheatley's familiarity with the poetry of John Milton. Wheatley so valued the poetry of Milton that she could not be brought to
sell her valuable edition of Paradise Lost, even when she was destitute and dying. The copy was given to Wheatley by the
mayor of London during her visit there and is now in the Houghton collection of Harvard University.
Wheatley was an astonishing prodigy in the Boston Wheatley family, which had bought her as a seven year old. She mastered
English and Latin, and as a teenager she translated the Niobe section of Ovid's Metamorphoses into English poetry. She also
expressed a great desire to create an African American epic, comparing herself unfavorably to Homer, Milton, and Sir Isaac
Newton in the poem "Phillis's Reply to the Answer." Perhaps the most effective statement of her desires to accomplish greatness
in poetry is taken from an early poem, "To Maecenas."
Great Maro's strain in heav'nly numbers flows,
The Nine inspire, and all the bosom glows.
O could I rival thine and Virgil's page,
Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage;
Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn,
And the same ardors in my soul should burn:
Then should my song in bolder notes arise,
And all my numbers pleasingly surprize;
Wheatley was to die at thirty-one, outliving all the members of the Wheatley family to which she had belonged. The
Revolutionary War took its toll on slave and slaveowner alike.
George Moses Horton (17971880?) sought, begged, and wrote for his freedom from the North Carolinian Horton family for
most of his
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life, but did not gain his freedom until 1865, when he followed Union troops to Philadelphia. Horton was outspoken on the
wrongs of slavery, and several collections of his works were published during his lifetime. He spent his most creative period
while attached to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a janitor. There he wrote many antislavery poems as well as
love poems for the students for pay, and also had extensive contact with supporters interested in selling his book, The Hope of
Liberty (1829), in order to buy his freedom. "The Art of a Poet," from The Naked Genius (1865), written after Horton had
achieved freedom, reveals a rigorous understanding of the demands of poetry and offers a rare moment of artistic self-reflection
in early African American poetry.
True nature first inspires the man,
But he must after learn to scan,
And mark well every rule;
Gradual the climax then ascend,
And prove the contrast in the end,
Between the wit and fool.
A fool tho' blind, may write a verse,
And seem from folly to emerge,
And rime well every line;
One lucky, void of light, may guess
And safely to the point may press,
But this does not refine.
Polish mirror, clear to shine,
And streams must run if they refine,
And widen as they flow;
The diamond water lies concealed,
Till polished it is ne'er revealed,
Its glory bright to show.
A bard must traverse o'er the world,
Where things concealed must rise unfurled,
And tread the feet of yore;
Tho' he may sweetly harp and sing,
But strictly prune the mental wing,
Before the mind can soar.
It is not known the extent to which Horton's location in the South and position as slave made it impolitic for him to speak out
against his
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own slavery in violent terms. It is quite true that slavery in the nineteenth century was more brutal than that of the previous
century, and poets such as Charles Lewis Reason (18181893) and James Monroe Whitfield (dates unknown, fl. 1853) were
among many who blasted a United States consciousness, morality, and politics that permitted the continued outrage of slavery.
Whitfield wrote, in his poem, America (from America and Other Poems, 1853):
America it is thee,
Thou boasted land of liberty,
It is to thee I raise my song,
Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.
Whitfield goes on to delineate the particular crimes of slavery, including the rape of slave women, and he accentuates the irony
of African Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War "to forge fresh fetters, heavier chains for their own children." He
wrote a poem in honor of the black hero, Cinque, and honored the British abolition of slavery on August 1, 1838. Ann Plato
(1820?-?) also commemorates the August 1 event, but much of her remaining works are pious Christian reflections on earthly
life and heavenly reward. A notable exception is "The Natives of America," a dialogic poem in which a father describes Native
American life to his child. The cause and nobility of the Native Americans is lauded and the marauding, usurping Europeans are
the villains. Plato lived in Hartford, Connecticut, and her collection of poetry, Essays, Including Biographies and Miscellaneous
Pieces in Prose and Poetry (1841), was published through the help of her church.
Charles Lewis Reason (18181893) was a strongwilled and highly accomplished poet and teacher. Racism kept him from a high
position in the Episcopal Church, and most of his working years were spent teaching in the New York public school system.
Reason wrote many stirring poems against slavery as evidenced by these lines from "The Spirit Voice" (1841), where he
manipulates the stanza form to present perceptions both abstract and natural.
'Tis thought alone, creative fervent thought!
Earnest in life, and in its purpose bent
To uphold truth and right, that rich is fraught
With songs unceasing, and with gleamings sent
Of sure things coming from a brighter world.
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Reasons poem, "Freedom" (1846), narrates the progress of freedom from the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome until the
present, and shows the influence of, if not a direct acquaintance with, Hegel's concepts of the development of nations.
In the decade preceding the Civil War the poets Alfred Gibbs Campbell, John Sella Martin, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
were among those most vigorous in their condemnation of slavery and of the fugitive slave law that made it compulsory for all
U.S. citizens to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Campbell (dates unknown, fl. c. 18531883) wrote many poems
condemning the hypocrisy of Fourth of July celebrations, and was a strong supporter of women's rights and prohibition. His
poem, "To a Young Mother" (in Poems, 1883), is remarkable for its sensitivity and avoidance of sentimentality; his antislavery
poems are stark and uncompromising" precious indeed / to Modern Moloch as the agony / of the fond mother when her child is
snatched./ . . . / Or / The piercing shriek of the poor hunted slave / Torn piecemeal by his bloodhounds." ("Warning"); and he
reveals an admirable capacity for intellectual openness and religious tolerance in ''Cry 'Infidel.' " Campbell has full control of
language, style, and emotional power in his poems, and uses blank verse, rhymed tetrameter couplets, and irregular stanza forms
with ease. Perhaps his most effective poems are those of reflection, "Ode to Death," "On the Deep," and "Questionings." In the
last poem he poses the supreme unanswerable question.
If thou (as some philosophers would say),
Art thus of God a part disintegrate,
Imprisoned for a time in worthless clay,
But destined still to a deltic state,
To reabsorption in the Infinite,
Why thus art fettered in the murky tomb
Of earth's soul-dungeon, where no certain light
From Light's Eternal Source dispels the gloom?
Is it for discipline? What need hath God
To learn, who is Himself the Primal Fount
Of Wisdom? To what end the weary road
Of life's terrestrial, whence so hard to mount
To heaven's serener clime? Is't punishment?
Hath God then sinned? And doth God punish God?
If thou canst fathom the Divine intent,
Solve this dark problem, and cast light abroad?
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Just prior to the Civil War John Sella Martin(1831-?) published the apocalyptic poem, "The Sentinel of Freedom," which
prophesied a second coming after the United States is swept clean from the corruption of slavery. The poem has obvious
connections with Milton's Paradise Lost, an epic that served as a model for political protest in England, the Caribbean, and the
United States as early as 1705. Martin's "The Hero and the Slave: Founded on Fact" (1862) is courageous in that it castigates
New England racism even as it praises the northerners for fighting the Civil War against slavery. Not many African Americans
had the fortitude to argue in print with their supporters.
Both before and after the Civil War Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (18241911) was a popular poet, abolitionist, prohibitionist,
and advocate for women's rights. Her poems on prohibition are often maudlin and sentimental, as in "The Ragged Stocking"
from Idylls of the Bible (1900).
Then I knelt by this little stocking
And sobbed out an earnest prayer,
And arose with strength to wrestle
And break from the tempter's snare.
Her antislavery poetry, and especially her long epic poem, Moses: A Story of the Nile, is more successful in style, power, and
variation of tone. Moses, written in irregular blank verse, retells the biblical story by making Moses a mulatto who freely
chooses to return to the aid of his enslaved people. Harper's poems went through more than twenty editions in her lifetime, an
astonishing testimony to her loyal audience.
After the Civil War more African American poetry focused on such unpolitical subjects as romantic love, dramatic heroes, and
sentimental empassioned heroines. Eloise Bibb Thompson (18781927) wrote many poems in this genre, which were published in
Poems, 1895. She spent much of her life in California, chose Italy as the setting for much of her work, and lived as a staunch
Catholic throughout her life. In addition to romantic poems Thompson wrote several poems on Biblical themes, such as "Judith"
and "The Expulsion of Hagar," the second theme often having special significance for African American women since Hagar
was the slave concubine of Abraham, the patriarch of the Hebrews. Thompsons oeuvre also includes a tribute to Frederick
Douglass.
The lyric poetry of Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1852?1916) focused on imaginary idyllic scenes of delight and pleasure. She uses
new stanzaic
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forms to express her approbation of nature as the fit setting of love, but often her images have prettiness without substance, as in
"rose-gleam" and "aisles of space" in "Idyll.''
Down in the dell,
A rose-gleam fell
From azure aisles of space;
There with a light tread
A maiden sped,
Sweet yearning in her face.
She wrote sonnets to her literary and political heroes, "Milton" and "Robert G. Shaw," and it is perhaps in the sonnet form that
she makes her greatest creative impact. Her two published works are Poems (1887) and Sonnets (1893).
Charlotte Forten Grimké (18371914), best known for her extensive journals on the nineteenth century, also wrote fourteen
poems encouraging abolition, admiring political daring, and giving reverence to life in the context of task and freedom. She
opens "A Parting Hymn" with the following lines, which reveal her awareness of the loveliness of nature and the precarious
balance of human life.
When Winter's royal robes of white
From hill and vale are gone
And the glad voices of the spring
Upon the air are borne,
Friends who have met with us before,
Within these walls shall meet no more.
The most important African American journalist of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Timothy Thomas Fortune
(18561928), also wrote a volume of poetry, Dreams of Life, in which the poems focused on the emptiness of life, its ephemeral
joys, its shortness of days. While a vigorous agitator for the right of African Americans in newspapers and journals, it seems
that in his private life and reflections he brooded most over the insufficiency of life's joy to compensate for its griefs. In "We
Know No More" he wrote:
I sometimes feel that life contains
Nothing, in all its wealth, to pay
For half the sorrows and the pains
That haunt our day.
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The most popular and significant African American poet of the nineteenth century was Paul Laurence Dunbar (18721906). His
popularity was so great that it is difficult to number the reprints of his many collections, the first of which was "Lyrics of Lowly
Life" (1895), and often his praise has been considered excessive by those who feel that other African American poets deserve
comparable attention. Dunbar's facility with all major forms of Anglo-American poetry, his gift in adapting African American
dialect to these various forms, and his undeniable lyric virtuosity combine to give full justification to his high status. It is
unfortunate that the American tendency to feel that "we have one already" (WHOA) has kept other poets from the attention of
potential readers. However, this racist propensity of the American critical establishment should not detract from the absolute
achievement of Dunbar in lyrics of both standard English and African American dialect. In his reflective poem, "Ere Sleep
Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes,'' meter, form, diction, and theme combine to amplify that human moment of selfquestioning and cosmic curiosity.
Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes,
Which all the day with ceaseless care have sought
The magic gold which from the seeker flies;
Ere dreams put on the gown and cap of thought,
And make the waking world a world of lies,
Of lies most palpable, uncouth, forlorn,
That say life's full of aches and tears and sighs,
Oh, how with more than dreams the soul is torn,
Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes.
Dunbar is equally effective in his dialect poems, as can be seen in "An Ante-Bellum Sermon."
Now ole Pher'oh, down in Egypt,
Was de wuss man evah evah bo'n,
An' he had de Hebrew chillun
Down dah wukin' in his co'n;
'T well de Lawd got tiahed o' his foolin',
An' sez he: I'll let him know
"Look Hyeah, Moses, go tell Pher'oh
Fu' to let dem chillun go."
Dunbar himself often complained that his audience, primarily white, only enjoyed his dialect poetry in what he called bad
English, "a jingle
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in a broken tongue." Although there was certainly some racist desire to hear blacks speak "bad" English in Dunbar's audience, the power of
Dunbar's dialect poetry derives not from mistakes in English but from the masterful manipulation of African and African American offbeat
polyrhythms, which were a highly creative artistic innovation in the English language.
The fiery, unconventional life of Menken Adele Isaac Barclay (18391868) left us with perhaps the most exclamatory poetry in American
letters. Barclay worked as an actress, had several husbands, lovers, and even names. Her first husband was Jewish, and Barclay herself
converted to Judaism and wrote several poems on Jewish themes, including "Hear, O Israel." She lived a consciously Jewish life and received
a Jewish burial at her death. Barclay saw herself as a misunderstood genius who never had the freedom to achieve her greatest artistic goals.
Her works are as brilliant and fiery in diction and form as was her life, and her poetry is given to dramatic stances of repudiation,
sensuousness, despair, and love. The following excerpt is from "Hear, O Israel."
Hear, O Israel? and plead my cause against the ungodly nation!
'Midst the terrible conflict of Love and Peace, I departed from thee, my people, and spread my tent of many colors in the land of Egypt.
In their crimson and fine linen I girded my white form.
Sapphires gleamed their purple light from out the darkness of my hair.
The silver folds of their temple foot-cloth was spread beneath my sandaled feet.
Thus I slumbered through the daylight.
Slumbered 'midst the vapor of sin,
Slumbered 'midst the battle and din,
Wakened 'midst the strangle of breath,
Wakened 'midst the struggle of death!
Almost all of the poetry of Joseph Seaman Cotter, Sr. (18611949), focuses on themes of racial pride and advancement. Poems honoring
Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes express all that Cotter found best in these
heroes with regard to racial equality and justice. Cotter had facility in many styles and dictions and used iambic tetrameter and the more
highly respected iambic pentameter with equal ease.
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In addition to the African American lyric poets of the nineteenth century, the aforementioned and other African American poets
wrote epic poetry, an African American poetic genre that has been unidentified, unknown, unrecognized, and unanalyzed before.
For this discussion I take epic to mean a long narrative in poetry, describing the origin, nature, or destiny of a people, race, or
group, depicting a hero or heroic ideal, and incorporating the cultural ideal. Frances Harper, in her poem, Moses: A Story of the
Nile, is one of a fellowship of nineteenth-century African American epic poets that includes James Ephraim McGirt (18741930),
Albert Allson Whitman (18511901), James Madison Bell (18261902), George Marion McClellan (18601934), George Hannibal
Temple (b. unknown, fl. 1900), George Reginal Margetson (1877-?), Edward Smythe Jones (1888-?), Fenton Johnson (1888-?),
and Maurice N. Corbett (b. unknown, fl. 1914).
Harper's Moses (1889) honors the ideal of the gifted African American's return to assist the remainder of the race in achieving
freedom, education, and equality. It is written in Miltonic blank verse. Since the 1700s British, Caribbean, and American poets
often used Miltonic blank verse as a vehicle for demanding political change.
The ealiest African American poem in this tradition is John Boyd's The Vision, which was published in England in 1835. James
Ephraim McGirt wrote three poems in the epic style, "Avenging the Maine," "Siege of Manila," and "Siege of Santiago." These
works are primarily military in scope, and have more in common with the sixteenth-century Italian epics of Tasso and Ariosto
than they have with the more pastoral epics of Dante and Milton.
Albert Alison Whitman wrote three highly self-conscious epics, The Rape of Florida, Not a Man and Yet a Man, and An Idyl of
the South: An Epic in Two Parts. The Rape of Florida is almost a political treatise; it defends the Seminole Native Americans
against European incursions and praises the Seminoles for their help in assisting runaway slaves. An Idyl and Not a Man deal
more specifically with African American slavery and racism, with the Idyl giving a view of the tragic mulatto, Not a Man an
extended poetic discussion of African American manhood.
George Marion McClellan's The Legend of Tannhauser, written in blank verse, is an impressive accomplishment, wedding style,
diction, form, and sentiment. It is perhaps the most successful work of the genre.
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In horror-stricken tones the nobles cried,
"Hear him! Hear him! So to the Venusburg
And in his blood bathe every sword." With cries
The ladies hastened from the hall, save fair
Elizabeth, who stood there shuddering
Betwixt her horror and her mighty love.
In The Epic of Columbus' Bell (1900) George Hannibal Temple relates the incidence by which the original bell from Columbus's
ship becomes the churchbell of an African American church in New Jersey. Here the African Americans, still caught up in the
prevalent world view that admires the political symbols of the nation in spite of its oppressive and racist legal systems, finds
honor in preserving this palpable symbol of the coming of the Europeans to the Americas.
The comic epic is represented by George Reginal Margetson's The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry Society (1916), which mocks
a thinly disguised Harvard University for its inability to identify true poets. Haryard University was also the subject for an epic
by Edward Smythe Jones, who supposedly walked barefoot to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to find wisdom, knowledge,
and higher education. His epic, Harvard Square, was written in jail, where he was placed for his efforts to achieve his goals. His
production earned him a job as janitor at the university and he was allowed to listen in on classes.
In Fenton Johnson's The Vision of Lazarus the character travels on a Dantean journey through heaven and hell, in which Homer
is found resident in a Christian heaven. Johnson's knowledge of Western literature is formidable, and although some of the
scenes are a challenge to intellectual sobriety, the attributes of his other scenes are dramatic and compelling.
Maurice N. Corbett's The Harp of Ethiopia (1914) is the most sustained epic of this African American nineteenth-century genre.
Corbett traces black accomplishment from the ancient Near East and Africa to the present, with several passages detailing the
self-defense of African Americans during the Civil War. He ends the poem with prophecies of high achievements in politics and
art by African Americans, and the vigor of his closing lines are effectively inspiring.
Thus we come from Lucy Terry's martial poem of communal self-defense, through the early desire to create great poetry by
such writers as Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon, to arrive at the apex of nine-
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teenth-century African American lyric and epic poetry in Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James
McClellan, Albert Alison Whitman, H. Cordelia Ray, and Maurice N. Corbett. The immediate political requirements of the Civil
War gave African American poets the freedom to write on all human themes, racism and flowers, wars and love, lynchings and
childhood.
Carolivia Herron
Further Reading
Bontemps, Ama, ed. American Negro Poetry. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963.
Brawley, Benjamin, ed. Early Negro American Writers: Selections with Biographical and Critical Introductions. University of
North Carolina, 1935.
Corbett, Maurice N. The Harp of Ethiopia. Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1914; repr. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for
Libraries, 1971.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader. Eds. Jay Martin and Gossie H. Hudson. New York: Dodd, Mead,
1975.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980.
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century
Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988..
Jahn, Janheinz. A Bibliography of Neo-African Literature from Africa, America, and the Caribbean. London: A. Deutsch, 1965.
Loggins, Vernon. The Negro Author: His Development in America, 1900. New York: Kennikat, 1964.
Plato, Ann. Essays, Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry. The Schomburg Library of
Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Porter, Dorothy B. "Early American Negro Writing." Bibliographical Society of America Papers (1945), 39:192268.
North American Negro Poets, 17601944. Hattiesburg, Miss.: Book Farm, 1945.
Robinson, William H., ed. Early Black American Poets: Selections with Biographical and Critical Introductions. Dubuque: W.
C. Brown, 1969.
Schomburg, Arthur A. Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry. New York: C. F. Heartman, 1916.
Sheldon, George. A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts: The Times When and the People by Whom It Was Settled, Unsettled,
and Resettled: With a Special Study of the Indi-
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an Wars in the Connecticut Valley, with Geneologies. Deerfield: E. A. Hall, 18951896.
Sherman, Joan. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, 1989.
Sherman, Joan, ed. Collected Black Women's Poetry. 4 vols. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women
Writers. New York Oxford University Press, 1988.
Stetson, Erlene, ed. Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women 17461980. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States. Trans. Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
Wheatley, Phillis. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women
Writers. New York Oxford University Press, 1988.
Wheatley, Phillis. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1989.
White, Newman Ivey, and Walter Clinton Jackson, eds. An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes. Durham, N.C.: Moore,
1968.
Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature: A Critical History with a 1,520-Title Bibliography of Works Written By and About
Black Americans. Totowa, N.J.: Rowna and Allanheld, 1974, 1984.
Whitman, Albery Allson. An Idyll of the South: An Epic Poem in Two Parts. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1974.
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The Epic in the Nineteenth Century
The rigid generic categories of the New Criticism have cast a long shadow upon us all, especially upon anyone now in midcareer. During the first week of an "Introduction to Literature" course I took as a freshman in 1958, students were given a list of
genres with which we were expected quickly to "become familiar" (translation" memorize"). ''Epic" was tidily tucked away as
the first and highest subdivision of "Narrative Poetry." A list of presumably all of the several kinds of poetry ("Narrative, Lyric,
Dramatic," subclassified by stanza forms and meter) preceded similar lists for "Fiction, "Non-Fiction Prose," and "Drama."
Poetry, we soon discovered, had been the first form of human literary expression and had remained the highest of literary kinds.
For the truly sensitive reader, poetry was readily identifiable as a separate and special realm open to all but entered by few. Not
wishing to be thought insensitive, and not yet willing to abandon all hope of entering special realms, I tried to memorize the list,
but succeeded only in becoming familiar with it.
Such a list of genres, like any spreadsheet, encourages comprehensive and hierarchical thinking by denying that categories
overlap. Any dunce, I was led to assume, knew poetry from prose. Never mind that the Greek word epos meant "narrative" and
not "narrative poetry," nor that Aristotle's Of the Art of Poetry is concerned mostly with drama. Never mind that, as recently as
1749, Henry Fielding had founded a "new province of writing" that he had called a "comic epic poem in prose." Never mind
that, among many other nineteenth-century writ-
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ers, nonentities such as Scott, Cooper, Carlyle, Simms, Melville, Thackeray, Prescott, Parkman, Norris, and Kipling had all
explicitly argued that the epic could and should be transformed from poetry into either historical romance or romantic history,
both to be written in a poetic prose. The word epic was assumed to connote poetry, and poetry was not to be confused with
prose.
Scholarly understanding of epic had reached a broad, useful, and still familiar consensus. Because of the research of Milman
Parry and Albert Lord, the prefaces and translations of C. S. and C. Day Lewis, and the critical books of C. M. Bowra and
Cedric Whitman, it was commonly accepted that "Primary Epic" meant the oral narrative poetry of warrior societies (Homer,
Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, the Niebelungenlied) and "Secondary Epic" meant written heroic narratives (Virgil, Dante,
Milton) by authors of later, more civilized nations who wished to transform the old oral conventions into imperial and Christian
contexts. Whatever followed John Milton in the way of heroic narrative, even if it were worthy of comparison to Paradise Lost
on aesthetic grounds, was no longer an epic but something that should be discussed and taught within other generic categories.
Are such convictions now entirely of the past? You who read this essay probably assume that, at least for purposes of literary
history, an epic is a poem. An epic may be short or long, joyful or despairing in tone, imagistic or narrative in structure, but
most of us academics presume that we can readily select the epics from our bookshelves. The epics are thought to be those
ambitious poems, from Homer to John Berryman, that celebrate some kind of heroism (be it a warrior's deed or a poet's
imagination) and that convey the values and customs of a culture. If you more or less agree with such a definition, you do so in
part because four fine, influential studies of "American epic" by Roy Harvey Pearce, James Miller, Michael Bernstein, and
Jeffrey Walker all share these assumptions. Among academic critics the heart of the matter of American epic has been the
twentieth-century long poem (Eliot, Pound, Williams, Crane, Berryman, Olson), Walt Whitman is their predecessor and poetic
father, and other nineteenth-century works are either touching, ridiculous failures (Barlow's The Columbiad) or are simply not
germane to what "the American epic" is presupposed to be.
In fairness to the reader, every writer should divulge known assumptions. When the editors of the Columbia History of American
Poetry
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asked me to contribute an essay "on the American epic poem through the nineteenth century," I replied that half of my essay
must concern what is ordinarily thought to be prose. I did so because I recognize no reliable and defensible distinction between
prose and poetry since the mid-eighteenth century. At that time Samuel Johnson demonstrated with pitiless accuracy that there
must always be a difference between poetry, which is of abiding interest, and mere verse, which is not. If, however, we define
verse as the placement of words in lines of approximate metrical regularity, then the term free verse truly is playing tennis with
the net down. On the other hand, who among us would wish to argue that long sections of Paterson are not poetry, simply
because they have the qualities of good newspaper journalism without the bad qualifies of mere verse? Robert Frost's two
typically foxy raids on this problemthat all poetry is "metaphor" and that all poetry has "rhythm"offer us no help at all; they
simply claim all good literature for poetry. Are we left then with only one distinction intact: that "prose'' is spaced on the page
with its line lengths determined extrinsically by the margins of paper, whereas "poetry" is spaced on the page by some kind of
internal standard, not necessarily rhythmic (vide Marianne Moore)? If you find this last, desperate distinction in any way useful,
it's yours.
The breakdown of the distinction between prose and poetry (and therefore between epic and verse) in the early nineteenth
century is not, however, a hobbyhorse of my making. It was a willful heresy that broke down Neoclassic categories and soon
became the basis for new genres and for new ways of transforming old genres. We are now perhaps overly familiar with the
"organicist" and vatic implications of Emerson's dictum "It is not meters, but a meter-making argument, that makes a poem," but
we often forget that, by essay's end, Emerson has claimed for poetry, not only Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, but
also Plato, Pythagoras, Plutarch, Raphael, Shakespeare, Bacon, Kepler, Swedenborg, and the dictionary. As Walter Scott's
widely read 1824 Brittanica essay on Romance shows, Scott had created in the Waverley novels a form of fiction that was
meant to incorporate history, epic, and romance. The natural metaphors of an Indian comprised, for Cooper and Simms, a speech
far more "poetic" than the written abstractions of the white man, be they in verse or prose. The soliloquies of Captain Ahab scan
in more regular blank verse than many of the soliloquies of Milton's Satan (try it). Before, during, and after writing The History
of
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the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott thought of his subject as a "magnificent epic." And Walt Whitman, that supposed exemplar of
"the American epic" for the nineteenth century, contended in his 1855 preface that "the expression of the American poet . . .is to
be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic" (emphasis mine).
And so it goes. My point is simply that, if we wish to explore the course of "epic poetry" in nineteenth-century America, we can
afford no neo-Aristotelian categories of our making. We must attend to the kinds of generic transformations authors wished to
achieve and we must consider the reasons for them. Emerson, who claims to have loved bare lists of names, would surely have
had scant patience with any academic list of separable and separate genres. To understand the development of "the American
epic poem in the nineteenth century" we must be prepared to turn to "prose," to read carefully, and to stay loose.
Between Timothy Dwight's The Conquest of Canaan (1785) and Alfred Mitchell's The Coloniad (1858) at least nineteen epic
poems were completed and published by American authors. Six would-be epics were published incomplete and five more were
abandoned, probably wisely. Although epic poems continued to be written in England during the same era, the sheer amount of
American heroic verse suggests an acute cultural need. Former colonials needed their own epic poem both to justify casting off
the British father and to demonstrate the New Republic's cultural maturity. After the widely proclaimed failure of Barlow's The
Columbiad (1807), the need for an American epic intensified rather than lessened. As the country entered an era of expansive
nationalism, Barlow's failing was often thought to have been his outdated Deistic and international republicanism, not his lack of
artistry. In the twelve to forty canto epics of Daniel Bryan (The Mountain Muse, 1813), Richard Emmons (The Fredoniad,
1827), and Walter Marshall McGill (The Western World, 1837), "imperium sine fine" is assumed to have been Virgil's true
theme, readily transferable to America's western soil, and readily applicable against every red coat and red skin. For gargantuan
dullness and unconscious ethnocentrism, such poems are truly exemplary.
During the post-Revolutionary period, however, an American determined to write heroic poetry faced admittedly insoluble
problems
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of content and form that he (the genre in America at this time seems to have had no "she") could not quite identify. Although
urgent calls for "the American epic" began to appear in periodicals immediately after the Peace of Paris in 1783, there was no
agreement as to what "the American epic" should be. Was America's ''epic rage" (Bishop Berkeley's prophetic term) to be
concerned with the Planting of New England, the American Revolution, worldwide republicanism, or the setfling of the West?
If the highest national mission was religious rather than political, should not the American epic concern a universal biblical
subject Milton had left untouched (vide Thomas Brockway's The Gospel Tragedy: An Epic Poem (1795), Elhanahan
Winchester's The Process and Empire of Christ (1805), Johnson Pierson's The Judead (1844), and, of course, Dwight's The
Conquest of Canaan). An even more vexing problem was the adapting of new subjects and new values to an old form. Because
America was so grand but so recent an experiment, heroic events had not yet acquired the advantages of remote legend and
would need to be made, not recalled. Americans were educated to revere the art of Homer as the first among poets, but to
despise the butchery of Achilles, the glory-hunting of Hector and the deviousness of Odysseus. How then could the hero of New
World Enlightenmentthe peaceful, republican farmerbecome the hero of a new and higher poem that was still recognizable as an
epic? Were heroic couplets, councils of chieftains, visits to hell, propositions and invocations, and the whole panoply of divine
machinery in any way adaptable to American heroic literature? If not, could one write an epic without them?
Not a few would-be national bards were, to be sure, blithely untroubled by such questions. With Pope's Homer at their right
hand, Paradise Lost at their left, and Dryden's Virgil somewhere in between, they made the easy character identifications,
reclothing George Washington as Aeneas, Andrew Jackson as Achilles, Lord Cornwallis or Benedict Arnold or perhaps
Tecumseh as Satan, and then simply let the heroic couplets and epic conventions flow, all in the service of their country. The
most spectacular public failure among the imitative poems, however, was also the most thoughtful and innovative in its
purposes. In the last book of The Columbiad, Joel Barlow called for an end to the martial glory, religious superstition, and
repressive politics of the entire epic tradition by imagining a new poet-prophet:
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For him no more, beneath their furious gods,
Old Ocean crimsons and Olympus nods,
Uprooted mountains sweep the dark profound
Or Titans groan beneath the rending ground.
No more his clangor maddens up the mind.
To crush, to conquer, and enslave mankind,
To build on ruin'd realms the shrine of fame,
And load his numbers with a tyrant's name.
According to Barlow's truly radical viewpoint, fear of the unknown had led primitive peoples to create gods; worship of gods
made believers servile; servility led to feudalism and priestcraft; feudalism and priestcraft have thrived by wars that maintain the
power of the few over the many. Traditional epic poetry, which accepts the powers that be, has held back enlightenment by
assuming that war is the essential metaphor of human existence. Only through international commerce, an international peacekeeping league, and shared advances in science and technology, could the power of the individual be released to build a new
and more heroic republican order. Barlow's visionary affirmations, then ridiculed by reviewers and later shared by Walt
Whitman, may contain the most practicable path for man's survival yet devised.
At least since The Aeneid, the tradition of epic poetry had been sustained by transformative imitation of one's predecessors.
Barlow's vision of a new heroism is a New World republican's way of reshaping Milton's claim to have possessed a "higher
argument" than Homer or Virgil. To envision republican heroism, however, is not the same as writing a new epic poem that
convincingly affirms it. Barlow begins The Columbiad with lines capitalized in such a way as to be immediately recognizable as
a Proposition:
I SING the Mariner who first unfurl'd
An eastern banner o'er the western world
And taught mankind where future empires lay
In these fair confines of descending day.
We are here in the domain of verse, not poetry; every line is declarative and almost every noun has its adjective. At best, such
couplets convey the force of a new idea with sturdy clarity. At worst (when Barlow is elevating his diction, listing New World
achievements in epic catalogues, or working through an epic simile), Barlow's medium declines
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into relentless bombast. The superiority of New World republicanism is proclaimed through tepid imitation of poetic
conventions that are Old World and aristocratic. In approved Virgilian fashion, Barlow's invocation to the muse follows hard
upon his epic's Proposition. Because his muse is Freedom rather than Urania or Athena, Barlow stakes out the defiant claim "to
teach all men where all their interest lies": "Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee, / Invoke no miracle, no Muse but
thee." His "Freedom" however is herself a classical goddess, robed in the same frozen elevation as "Pop" Emmons's Fredonia,
Edgar Poe's Psyche, New York's Statue of Liberty, or the opening icon of any film of Columbia Pictures. To throw a new
garment and a new name around an old figure is to adapt but not transform it.
The choice of a proper heroic subject, though difficult enough, was not the most vexing problem in the forming of a New World
epic. The very suitability of the "narrative" (epos) was beginning to come into question. The term could of course be conceived
in traditional Aristotelian fashion as the telling of one complete heroic story made up of many incidents. Dwight's The Conquest
of Canaan, Snowden's The Columbiad, Emmons's The Fredoniad, McGill's The Western World, and Alfred Mitchell's The
Coloniad all recount wars of empireusually one canto per battlereplete with intervening gods, single combats, and obtrusive
teleology centered around American republicanism. Poets like Daniel Bryan (The Mountain Muse, 1813) and James K. Paulding
(The Backwoodsman, 1819), who saw the conquest and settlement of western lands as America's heroic subject, slightly
loosened traditional narrative form, imagining a sparse fictional narrative of white settlement and Indian defeat, then adding
long verse discursions to achieve presumably proper length. By expanding The Vision of Columbus into The Columbiad,
however, Barlow suggested that New World epic could no longer be narrative in the traditional sense. Barlow's subject is not the
past incidents of Columbus's four voyages, but the progressive future of the entire Western world. Although The Columbiad
recounts the achievements of many a historical hero, the poem is less a narrative than a gigantic expansion of the eighteenthcentury Prospect Poem, as adapted by Barlow's generation to celebrating the Rising Glory of America.
All these models of poetic structure proved unsuccessful, perhaps inevitably so. Because American military heroism was too
recent to
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have become legendary, recasting the Baffles of Saratoga or New Orleans as New World reenactments of the glories on Troy's
windy plain proved laughable to any reader with half a memory. As representative western settlers, Bryan's Daniel Boone and
Paulding's Basil can have neither inner character and nor variety of daily life, because their deeds and character must somehow
be heroic and ordinary simultaneously.
Barlow's structural compromise, however liberating in theory, proved unworkable on the page. Throughout the entirety of his
epic, Barlow's all-knowing angel Hesper (a stand-in for Milton's Raphael) sequentially unfolds the future glories of America to
an imprisoned and despairing Columbus. Heroism becomes less an individual's act than a new republican faith that can emerge
in every reader; martial glory, though present in Hesper's narratives, is first subordinated and finally discredited. To become
enlightened, as Columbus is always persuaded to do, becomes the essential first step toward a more democratic and scientific
kind of Renaissance humanism. Such an unchanging structure promptly creates a numbing if not catatonic effect upon the
reader. Barlow celebrates the progressive march of history through unrelieved use of the most static and traditional of epic
conventions (the prophecy of a divine messenger). Neither Columbus nor the reader can engage the poem's important issues
because Hesper is forever preparing to deliver the Deistic, republican answer to them. Any opening for individuality (Walt
Whitman's "a simple separate person") or for our own imaginative response (Whitman's insistence that true poetry is
"suggestiveness") is quickly foreclosed by Barlow's relentless universalizing.
Traditionalists damned The Columbiad for its unacceptable departures from epic form; innovators damned it for its refusal to
depart from epic conventions. Those who continued to assume that the American epic had to be a long heroic narrative in verse
clearly had no idea what shape "the work of genius" (Hawthorne's phrase) could successfully assume. Safety lay in ridicule. As
verse epics more ponderous and traditional than Barlow's were published and fell into oblivion, the notoriety of The Columbiad
only grew. By the 1840s Barlow's by now unread poem was assumed to contain all the failures, all the absurdities, embodied in
the very notion of an American epic. Amid the trendy witticisms Barlow's poem evoked from Hawthorne, Lowell, Flint, Tuck-
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erman, and Whipple, Poe's rather turgid judgment in "The Poetic Principle" (1849) remains both the most influential and the
most dismissive: "The modern epic is, of the suppositious ancient model, but an inconsiderate and blindfold imitation. . . . The
epic mania . . . has for some years past, been gradually dying out of the public mind. The day of these artistic anomalies is
over."
Poe's attack on the endlessness of the modern epic and his defense of the short lyric poem are, of course, fully symbiotic critical
positions. Therein, however, lies the false simplicity of his argument. In promoting his own lyric quest for Supernal Beauty, Poe
greatly overreached himself. His refusal in 1849 to consider that "the modern epic" might appear in prose was, as Scott, Carlyle,
Cooper, and Prescott had already demonstratedand as Emerson well knewas outmoded as it was rigid. Poe's notion of the
"heresy of the didactic" led him not only to condemn contemporary epic imitations but also to dismiss their originals. Poe's
assertion that The Iliad is "based in an imperfect sense of art," is almost as foolish as his conclusion that "the ultimate,
aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun, is a nullity." We may rightly use Poe's famous essay to mark
the death of the long imitative epic poem, but it demonstrates neither the nullity nor the death of epic in his own time, let alone
in Homer's. Poe's poetic principle depends upon a false foreclosure.
By 1820, writers open to new ideas of heroic behavior and epic form found themselves in a choppy, open sea of literary
opportunity. Scott's poems and novels had shown that the medieval lay, the gothic romance, the epic, and regional history could
be mutually interwoven in the service of both prosy poetry and poetic prose. After MacPherson, Coleridge, and Scott, the
illusion of oral tale telling, in verse and/or prose, began to seem the essential medium of epic. As imitative verse epics in heroic
couplets or Miltonic blank verse repeatedly floundered, the possibility arose that America's great epic might be written in the
once low but presently popular genre of prose fiction. The need to display epic stature through parodic imitation receded in the
face of a demand for new forms that could be "original" in both meanings of the word.
The shift in media reflected shifts in values. Barlow's generation had assumed that progress lay in the spread of enlightened
white civiliza-
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tion, a belief quite consonant with the assumption that Virgil was the most correct of poets. By the 1820s it was conceivable to
reverse this assumption. Perhaps the New World's heroic subject was not the conquering of the savage by civilization, but the
demise of those noble and "primitive" peoples who had embodied the qualifies of the heroic age. At stake here was something
far deeper than following the trends of some zeitgeist called "Romanticism." To entertain such beliefs forced writers to question
the most basic literary and cultural assumptions of their upbringing. A presumably timeless hierarchy of separate literary genres
had to be abandoned. The literary conventions by which epic was defined had to be reshaped into viable contemporary literary
forms or dropped entirely. To protest the dispossession and victimization of Indians, Aztecs, or Incas was to undermine the
notions of cultural supremacy on which the very writing of "the American Epic" supposedly rested. Such changes were as
troubling as they were exhilarating. New literary forms had to be made by transforming, rather than imitating, the poems of
Virgil or Milton. White authors set out to devise forms of American epic in which heroic achievement was embodied, not in
what Europeans brought to the western world, but in what they had erased from it. Ironically, the search for American heroic
values gained lasting literary power only when the new Indian romance both subverted the reader's assumptions about the epic
genre and challenged the expansionist complacencies of the culture as a whole.
In the preface to The Yemassee (1835), Simms declared that "the modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the
present day offer for the ancient epic." Though an attentive reader of Rob Roy or The Last of the Mohicans might have reached
the same conclusion a decade earlier, Simms is bluntly advancing a proposition that he knows is still generally unaccepted.
Cooper's formulation of the same argument was to be both more oblique and more informative. In his review of Lockhart's
Memoirs of the Lift of Sir Walter Scott, Cooper noted that Scott's great achievement as a writer was that "he raised the novel, as
near as might be, to the dignity of the epic." To provide the proper context for reading The Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper ended
his 1850 preface (the last words written of the whole series) with its only mention of another author:
It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to
present the beau-ideal of their charac-
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ters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose the red man is to be represented only in the squalid
misery or in the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very
narrow view of an author's privileges. Such criticism would have deprived the world of even Homer.
As in Simms's formulation, the prose romance here becomes the modern domain of heroic poetry. For Simms, however, the
measure of prose epic had been its success in providing "adventures among the wild and wonderful . . . crowding events in a
narrow space of time." Although the Leatherstocking tales are surely not understocked with overcrowded adventures, the series
as a whole confirms Cooper's claim that the character and speech of the Red Man (and of Leatherstocking, who shares Indian
traits) can constitute a kind of "poetry" that is recognizably heroic.
The narratives of the first four Leatherstocking tales were clearly planned to demonstrate that the triumph of the literate, rational
and technological civilization of the white man should finally be regarded as both justified and inevitable. At novel's end a
capable white man is sure to marry a genteel maiden who represents the flower of civilization, while both the noble and the
diabolic savage die safely away. Beneath these seemingly imposed plots, however, are counterforces that forever unravel any
claim upon manifest destiny. The "Christian" white man can conquer the continent only by reverting to savage battle tactics. The
reader's admiration or awe (the defining response to epic literature) is primarily directed toward a childless and preternaturally
aged hero who belongs to neither red nor white culture, and who scornfully retreats from the westering civilizers he momentarily
agrees to serve. In order of their writing The Leatherstocking Tales fittingly end, not with any picturing of the conquest of
empire, but with the wilderness impassively resuming its control over Lake Glimmerglass, almost effacing all traces of the greed
of Tom Hutter and the thoughtlessness of Hurry Harry March.
"The business of a writer of fiction is to approach, as near as his powers will allow, to poetry." This dictum, from Cooper's 1831
preface to The Last of the Mohicans, has self-consciously epic dimensions within the novel itself. Cooper's characterization of
Magua, a "Prince of Darkness, brooding on his own fancied wrongs, and plotting evil," is, like Melville's Captain Ahab,
inconceivable without the prototype of Mil-
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ton's Satan. The moment when the natural metaphors of Magua's speech become most convincingly poetic, however, is also the
moment when his own wrongs are least fancied:
The Spirit that made men . . . gave the pale faces the nature of the pigeon; wings that never tire; young, more plentiful
than the leaves on the trees, and appetites to devour the earth. He gave them tongues like the false call of the wild-cat;
hearts like rabbits, the cunning of the hog, (but none of the fox,) and arms longer than the legs of the moose. With his
tongue, he stops the ears of Indians; his heart teaches him to pay warriors to fight his baffles; his reasoning tells him how
to get together the goods of the earth; and his arms enclose the land from the shores of the salt water, to the islands of the
great lake. His gluttony makes him sick. God gave him enough, and yet he wants all. Such are the pale faces.
We need consider nothing in the novel beyond Cooper's magnificent account of the massacre at Fort William Henry to recognize
that he assents to the historical truth of every one of Magua's poetic accusations. Magua is the victim of both a real personal
wrong (Colonel Munro's whipping) and a general racial wrong (the white man's manipulation and dispossession of the red).
Unlike Chingachgook and Uncas, who judge by intraracial contrasts (French vs. English, Hurons vs. Delawares), Magua's
interracial thinking leads him to recognize that race war is the red man's only hope. Cooper can discredit Magua only by
insisting that Magua's overriding motive is to exact an implacable personal revenge by abducting white women and then making
them his concubines. Magua may, like Satan, use truth for falsehood, good for evil, but his unfancied wrongs make Uncas's
quiet service of the English military seem innocently destructive to his own red race.
Cooper's reworking of epic conventions almost invariably complicates the reader's need to judge. When Chingachgook and
Magua (those supposed exemplars of Cooper's "good Indian" vs. Cooper's "bad Indian"), are sent into single combat, their dustand blood-covered bodies are described, in an epic simile, as "twisted together, like twining serpents, in pliant and subtle folds."
The last words of the novel, spoken by the aged patriarch Tamenund at the funeral obsequies of Uncas and Cora, are both more
bitter and less resigned than their prototype, Priam's lament for Hector:
Go children of the Lenape. The anger of the Manito is not done. Why should Tamenund stay? The pale-faces are masters
of the earth, and the time of the
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red-men has not yet come again. My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong;
and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans!
If we attend to the words' meanings, and not merely to their elegiac sound, we discover that both "the anger of the Manito" and
"the time of the red-man" are predicted to come again upon the white world, whether it be in worldly vengeance or in
otherworldly reconciliation.
At their deepest structural level, the Leatherstocking tales are based upon the oldest convention of primary or oral epic, the
semidivine pair. The Big Serpent and Hawkeye, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroklos, Beowulf and Wiglaf,
Roland and Oliver, seem to have the ability to perform anything except to escape suffering and mortality. In the Leatherstocking
tales, as in all four oral epics, there is a concluding sense that the values of an heroic age have passed away with the ending of
these twinned lives, leaving listener or reader saddened yet relieved to be living in a less glorious and less bloody era. Unlike all
four heroic pairs, however, Chingachgook and Hawkeye represent no community and have no followers. In the oldest extant
epic, Gilgamesh forms his bond with Enkidu, a dark-skinned hunter from the wilderness, and the two leave civilization to
undertake adventurous tasks together. Whereas Gilgamesh finally returns to the city of Uruk to guard the walls he has built,
Leatherstocking's heroism is inseparable from acts of defiance and departure. As an embodiment of the combined but unrealized
potential of two cultures, Leatherstocking belongs nowhere.
Just as the popularity of The Last of the Mohicans was partially due to the emerging controversy over Indian Removal, so the
fame of Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) reflects the debate over extraterritorial expansionism that was soon
to result in the Mexican-American War. Cooper's epic heroes, as his title indicates, are vanishing, uncorrupted Indians who
lament but do not openly resist Anglo-American supremacy. Although Prescott was a Conscience Whig, convinced that conflict
with Mexico was a rationalization for expansion of slavery interests, he had by 1839 committed himself to shaping his history of
the earlier conquest of Mexico into "an epic in prose" with Hernando Cortés as "the hero of the piece." Wedding the conventions
of epic narrative to a historical fiction had allowed Cooper to be flexible, wavering, inconsistent in his judgments. By shaping
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his immense research into an epic history, Prescott soughtas a willed act of the historian's reasonconsistently to demonstrate that
the conquest of the vast Aztec empire by a few ironclad Spaniards had been a "grand drama of Western Progress," a "daring,
chivalrous enterprise" full of "stupendous achievements" and exhibiting all that "extraordinary personal qualities in a hero can
give."
Prescott came to his life's work, the Matter of Spain, through extensive reading and reviewing of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto,
Tasso, Pulci, Ercilla, and Milton, along with much else. In his view "the poems of Homer were intended as historical
compositions." The greatness of primary epic lay in the Aristotelian ability of the tale teller to convey the march of "one
concentrated action, like the Ancient Drama." Oral narrative epic, always a hybrid of history and drama, was eventually
transformed into medieval chivalric Romance, a genre that sacrificed concentration of action to color of poetic detail and
elaboration of incident. Prescott's aim was to merge all these genres into one prose history, creating "an epic in prose, a romance
of chivalry . . . which, while it combines all the picturesque features of the romantic school, is borne onward on a tide of
destiny, like that which broods over the fictions of the Grecian poets."
In this last aim, if in no other, Prescott's History is a magnificent successas anyone who knows the sprawl of his historical
sources must attest. Perhaps because Prescott was nearly blind, he like Milton conceived a vast but shapely narrative steadily
narrowing in upon acts that are simultaneously a fall and a rise: the death of Montezuma, the doomed resistance of Guatemozin,
and Cortés's protracted siege of the Aztec capitol. As the barbarisms and beauties of Tenochtitlan are slowly, relentlessly
leveled in book 5, Prescott earns his insistence that interest in heroic narrative depends on the epic historian's ability to sustain a
Grecian sense of fatality. At the same time, however, Prescott's intended justification of Cortés collapses under the accumulated
evidence of the many Spanish cruelties and treacheries that Prescott has been too scrupulous to hide. As Prescott pens the last of
his panoramic word paintingsan overview of starving, defiant Aztecs standing in the rubble of their civilizationGuatemozin
explicitly emerges as "the hero," while Cortés, never very convincing as a knight of chivalry, recedes back into "this remarkable
man." Prescott's last attempt to provide a moral logic for "the right of conquest" remains at least as trou-
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bled as his first. The evident shift in Prescott's sympathies, his undermining of his own purpose, may of course be ascribed to
humane revulsion against the barbarities of whites who ''civilize" the savage in the name of Christ and King. But one suspects
that the tradition of epic poetry was equally influential. In Prescott's closing pages, Guatemozin and the Aztecs are not
sentimentalized as innocent victims of imperialism. They are rather viewed as heroes who, like Hector or Turnus, Beowulf or
Roland, have gained glory from maintaining to the death their doomed resistance to a superior force.
A Delaware heroic poem titled Walam Olum ("printed record") was partially transcribed from oral delivery during the 1830s,
but Cooper seems not to have known of it. Prescott's researches into Aztec accounts of the conquest stopped short of the chants
and heroic laments in Nahuatle that have been preserved by Leon Portilla in The Broken Spears. For both Cooper and Prescott
there were, of course, problems of these texts' accessibility as well as barriers caused by a non-European language and by the
fragmentary nature of almost all extant heroic narratives sung by defeated and preliterate peoples. To assume that these lacunae
amount to disinterest, however, would be misleading. The whole European epic tradition formed a lens through which, it was
thought, the heroic age should be seen. For white authors to write such narratives in various forms of prose was at least an
honest use of their own literary medium. But when Longfellow raided Schoolcraft's research into Winnebago customs, fitted
them into an overlay of Iroquois mythology, blithely transformed the whole into the tripping meter of the Finnish Kalevala, and
then offered Hiawatha as a coherent series of North American Indian legends, the result could only be poetic make-up of the
most transparent kind.
To convey the epic dimensions of Moby-Dick in three or four pages is about as easy as defining the whale. By modifying
Fielding's terminology, the question of the book's genre could be facilely settled by calling it a comic-epic-tragic-poem in prose.
Closer reading shows, however, that Melville has also given us an anatomy of whaling, several oral tales, a parodic sermon or
two, a romance, bad verse amidst glorious prosepoetry, a dream vision, a Shakespearean closet drama, many meditations, a
genealogy, not a few hideous and intolerable allegories, and a mock epic as well as an epic. The power of the book clearly
depends on
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its continuous transformation of genres as well as ideas. Because no truth is timeless or universal, no single genre can be
adequate, especially if the world of mind is one's subject.
Although Georg Lukács seems not to have read Melville, both the evasive cetology chapters and the multilayered narrative of
Moby-Dick confirm a remarkable insight from Lukács's The Theory of the Novel (1914):
The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence
of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficiala matter of
mere artistic technicalityto look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is
written in verse or prose.
External evidence also suggests that it was Melville's purpose to write "the American epic" in a bafflingly new genre of the sort
both Lukács and Bakhtin were later to praise. Shaping his review of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse into a call for an
heroic national literature, Melville abruptly proclaimed "we want no American Miltons." He then combined mockery of the
imitative epic poem with a sly promise of better things to come:
I was much pleased with a hot-headed Carolina cousin of mine who once said, "If there were no other American to standby, in literature, why, then, I would stand by Pop Emmons and his 'Fredoniad,' and till a better epic came along, swear it
was not very far behind the Iliad." Take away the words, and in spirit he was sound.
Melville's nonexistent Carolina cousin fully shares the kind of pity Redburn expressed for "a neglected poem by a neglected
Liverpool poet" who had written hundreds and hundreds of heroic couplets singing commercial growth along the Mersey. "This
epic, from the specimen before me, is composed in the old stately style, and rolls along commanding as a coach and four." In
the age of the Iron Horse or the world-roaming whaleship, the high ambition of the American epic could and should be
reaffirmed. The medical cure for the epic's old stately stylehopefully not a mortal prescriptionwould be somehow surgically to
"take away the words."
Except for a very occasional moment in the Leatherstocking tales, there had probably not been, in American heroic literature,
one successful, intentionally comic passage from the time of Dwight's The
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Conquest of Canaan through Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico. One of Melville's great achievements was to break
down the longstanding division Americans had maintained between epic and mock epic. Just as Trumbull's M'Fingal (1785) had
belonged to a dependent but supposedly separate subgenre, so Irving's History of New York (1809) had been a mock epic parody
of Current state histories that were currently claiming too much Revolutionary glory. Noah Webster's definitions of generic
terms allowed no mingling of the comic and heroic. The reader of Moby-Dick, however, is often unsure: whether Melville's
adaptations of epic conventions exalt the Pequod's quest, or belittle it by contrast, or mock outmoded elements of the epic form.
It is not merely by accident of a presumably changed purpose that Melville's invocation to the muse ("Bear me out in it, Thou
great Democratic God!") is to be found, very much in the fashion of Lawrence Sterne, in chapter 26. Why is it that Moby-Dick
contains so many different propositions, from the extracts of the poor devil of a sub-sub, through "this august dignity I treat of"
and "the Honor and Glory of Whaling" to Melville's pretended dismissal of "ther poets" in preference for the posteriority of "I
celebrate a tail''? There are at least fourteen epic similes in Moby-Dick, many of them as suspiciously ostentatious as the
elaborate three-day battle with which Melville's narrative (like Milton's war in heaven or Spenser's first book) climactically ends.
Philosophical polysyllabics alternate with American slang; grandeur of language suddenly gives way to grandiloquence or
obscure rant, most conspicuously so when Ishmael or Ahab claims Ahab to be the modern Prometheus, The polyglossic levels
of discourse in Melville's prose contain a mingling of epic and mock-epic that reveals Melville's distrust of the very heroisms of
attitude and action that continue to absorb him.
Like the 1855 Leaves of Grass, but in a different way, Moby-Dick represents a moment in literary history when generic terms
retain old meanings that must be wilfully, even gleefully, broken down. Although it is useful to consider whether particular
passages point toward tragedy or burlesque, grandeur or puffery, epic or mock-epic, the attempt to resolve such questions for the
text as a whole leads to patent absurdity. And so it is with the character of Ahab. The armada of scholars and critics who have
felt compelled to reach a judgment upon Ahab are by now revealed to have been collectively gazing into Melville's doubloon.
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A fuller understanding of Ahab may still come, however, from considering the literary construction of his character and the
literary contexts of his particular words. Whatever kind of "American" identity Ahab may be thought to prefigure, he is less a
Nantucket whaling captain than a hero fashioned from the words of non-American poetic and dramatic models: Achilles,
Prometheus, Faustus, Lear, Satan, and Manfred, to whom we should surely add Tegner's Frithiof and Carlyle's Cromwell. Ahab's
birth from epic and tragic predecessors becomes readily apparent as soon as a portion of his last speech is spaced differently
upon the page:
Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies
In my topmost grief. Ho, ho! From all
Your farthest bounds, pour ye now in,
Ye bold billows of my whole foregone life,
And top this one piled comber of my death!
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but
Unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee;
From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake
I spit my last breath at thee.
By association of literary idiom as well as content, Ahab's blank verse is here meant to endow him with the spirit of Milton's
Satan: "the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield." Just as epic
poem is transformed into prose romance, however, so the literary continuity among the two defiantly rebellious hero-villains is
established only to lead to a difference. Whereas Satan's "immortal hate" degenerates into lies, disguise, and a despair deserving
of a "dismal universal hiss," Ahab's last speech is arguably his greatest moment. Unlike Satan, Ahab can grow in courage
because his personal revenge has real cause and his metaphysical quest, however deluded, has an undeniable nobility of
purpose. Instead of knowingly declaring "evil be thou my good," one-legged Ahab hopes to rid the whole world of its surely
inscrutable and possibly evil God.
However much Ishmael may believe in his inner, insular Tahiti, he repeatedly exalts the power of individual resistance, even in
Ahab whose quest he has condemned. Through epic simile, Ishmael aggrandizes Ahab long after Ahab has bound his crew to
hunt the white whale:
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As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain,
Men fly the neighborhood of some lone,
Gigantic elm, whose very height and strength
But render it so much the more unsafe,
Because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts;
So at these last words of Ahab's
Many of the mariners did run from him
In a terror of dismay.
(from the chapter "The Candles")
This simile is surely an imitation (a "parody" according to Johnson's definition) of the simile Virgil used to describe Aeneas
enduring Dido's wrath:
As when, among the Alps, north winds
will strain against each other to root out
with blastsnow on this side, now thatstout
oak tree whose wood is full of years; the roar
is shattering, the trunk is shaken, and
high branches scatter on the ground; but it
still grips the rocks; as steeply as it thrusts
its crown into the upper air, so deep
the roots it reaches down to Tartarus:
no less than this, the hero; he is battered
on this side and on that by assiduous words;
he feels care in his mighty chest, and yet
his mind cannot be moved; the tears fall, useless.
(The Aeneid 4, tr. Allen Mandelbaum)
Once again, imitation has here become a splendid literary transformation. To Melville the destroying power of the hurricane
renders Ahab all the more grand because the lone gigantic elm is the special and conspicuous mark of hostile forces. Virgil's
interest is in the tenuous nature of Aeneas's resistance, the ability of the stout oak to remain firm even though its branches fall
and it groans under the blast. Virgil stresses the agony of suppressing individual feeling in pursuit of a grander communal
mission; Melville exalts intransigent defiance while implying its suicidal end. The reworking of a famous simile thus shifts a
Roman awareness of the necessary price of Imperium into a tribute to individuality that Tocqueville would have recognized as
especially American.
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Moby-Dick complicates my argument that epic renderings of the heroic age enabled white American writers to give voice and
stature to the very peoples being destroyed by the expansion of Euro-American culture. Admittedly, Melville pointedly shows
that people of color serve only as "Squires" at the command of the ship's white "Knights," and he pens many an acerbic hit at
various kinds of racial injustice. Nonetheless, racial issues are not the heart of epic conflict as they had been for Cooper and
Prescott. There is more than a little smiling condescension in the portrayal of Queequeg's noble savagery. No person of color
apparently has the strength of mind to resist the power of Ahab's "mighty brow." All the more reason, therefore, to note that the
American Indian is at least allowed to convey Melville's last judgment through a wordless gesture. As the "federated" ship of
state goes down forever, Tashtego hammers skyhawk to flag to mainmast, striking with an "etherial thrill'' of both revenge and
tribute.
Whitman's primacy and centrality to the tradition of the twentieth-century "personal epic" or "visionary epic" (The Cantos, The
Bridge, Paterson, The Dream Songs, The Maximus Poems) is a far more problematic matter than we usually assume. At best,
twentieth-century poets have made their several pacts with Walt Whitman, glorying in his breaking of the new wood, while
insisting that he was the most pig-headed of poetic fathers. Although Pound, Crane, Williams, Berryman, and Olson all staked
out varying claims to continue epic tradition in new poetic forms, Whitman himself had explicitly written in the 1855 preface
that Leaves of Grass was "not direct or descriptive or epic." Such questions of intent and influence are vexing enough, but they
pale beside an underlying problem of small audience and unaccepted form. Heroic age cultures generally cherished one
preeminent epic poem because that particular heroic narrative had acquired a choric role in defining its people's identity. From
Whitman's time to Berryman's, the American poet who has claimed that his own visionary power is sufficient for heroism has
been discovered, promoted, supported, and read, not by the American people as a whole, but by the academy and by other
writers. Instead of one continuing heroic narrative, Leaves of Grass and its successors offer us a gathering-up of individual
lyrics, loosely and sometimes forcibly connected. More is at stake here than extending the boundaries of the word epic beyond
useful definition. Two separable genetic questions arise. Even in
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1855, had prose already become the only medium sufficiently popular to satisfy the choric function of epic? Or, to phrase the
issue solely in terms of poetic narrative: can any lengthy work of heroic poetry abandon tale telling and yet remain readable and
memorable to the people who must finally determine its epic stature?
These are not the issues of hindsight only. Emerson's famous essay calling forth "The Poet" imagined a "genius of tyrannous
eye" who would sing, not one hero and his deeds, but all America, its geography and its occupations. In his 1839 essay
titled"Epic Poetry," Jones Very concluded that the very survival of epic now depended on abandoning narrative altogether:
It is in the greatness of the epic action that the poets succeeding Homer, if we except Milton, have failed; and the causes
which have operated against them, will always operate with increasing force against every attempt to represent the present
or future developments of the heroic character in action.
When the world is seen in terms of the self rather than the self in terms of the world, the past deed of any other person
necessarily becomes secondary. And so, to Emerson, Very, and Whitman alike, Aristotelian action must now be replaced by a
universal, imaginary process that originates in the democratic mind. As Very puts it, "Could intellectual power be represented
with the same objectiveness as physical power, there might be as many epics now as there are great minds." For Whitman,
loafing on the grass empowers everyone to experience his (or her?) heroic journey; just "shoulder your duds" and take to your
own open road by imagining yourself there.
The 1855 Leaves of Grass proposes a defiant rejection of epic conventions rather than an adaptation of them. As Whitman
planned his poem, he reminded himself, "Take no illustrations from the ancients or classics"; "What is to be done is to withdraw
from precedents"; "Not the first recognition of gods or goddesses, or Greece or Rome"; "Old forms, old poems, majestic and
proper in their own lands, here in this land are exiles." The very purpose of America, he wrote in An American Primer, is ''to
destroy all these [old myths and Gods] from the purposes of the earth, and to erect a new earth in their place." The greatness of
the epic is the literary myth perhaps most in need of demolition. Hence "to destroy" the old poetic conventions would not
transform the Old World epic (as Prescott and Melville had done) but end it forever.
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Whitman's first preface describes Leaves of Grass as "the great psalm of the republic," not a New World epic poem. Because
bardic prophecy of inner divinity is a heroism now available to all, all the poetic conventions suitable to the superior deeds of
superior men must be dismissed. Instead of an elaborate proposition reworking the conventional phrase "OfI sing," America's
heroic poem is to begin with a brash seriocomic self-assertion, immediately democratized:
I celebrate myself
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
The fifth section of "Song of Myself" shows that the muse is neither a force of external inspiration the poet must invoke, nor the
traditional standard for singing a cherished narrative. The muse is rather an ecstatic vision released at a moment of inner
integration when the Self's body and soul are sexually joined. Heroic couplet and blank verse are no longer pertinent to
American heroic song, in part because they are Old World forms, but, more important, because they comprise a special, elevated
language. The new metric must instead replicate everyone's breath patterns, adding phrase upon phrase in alternating patterns of
inspiration and respiration that sustain the illusion of "primary" oral delivery.
"Song of Myself" claims to upend what C. M. Bowra was to define as the essential purpose of epic poetyto create awe for the
hero who faces known death for the sake of honor or glory. Whitman's boast that it is "lucky to die, and I know it" is
unforgettable because the word "lucky" challenges centuries of accumulated tragic response to the earthly demise of Hector and
Beowulf, Adam and Jesus, and even (if we wish to update and Americanize), Leatherstocking, Guatemozin, and Ahab. Death is,
at the outset, willfully ruled out of Whitman's heroic vision:
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death
And if there was it led forward life,
and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
The gore of the battlefieldeven the murder of the 412 Texas Rangers and the Bon Homme Richards hideous victory over the
Serapisonly
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serves to show that "agonies are one of my changes of garments." Although the dead of all battles are subsumed within the two
words "these irretrievable," the poem's next section suggests that, as soon as "the corpses rise . . . the gashes heal . . . the
fastenings roll away," the Self's transfiguration will make any awe we still might feel for self-sacrificial death seem quite
superfluous.
Sheer enjoyment of his own brag enables Whitman to write lines that may be read as either heroic or mock-heroic. To be "Walt
Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos" is to be a quantum of energy forever in process of self-transformation
through his own words. Although all the Self's words are revelations, none of those revelations are permanent. As a
consequence, the finality of such epic conventions as the prophecy spoken atop a high hill (vide Virgil's Anchises, Milton's
Michael, Barlow's Hesper) becomes parodic in both senses. The poet leads "each man and each woman of you . . . upon a knoll"
but then refuses to divulge any future at all, slyly admonishing, "Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you. / You must
travel it for yourself . . . / I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself." The authority of traditional epic
narrative rested in considerable degree on the ''type scene" of a god's arrivalthat marvelous moment when an Athena, Venus, or
Raphael assumed visual shape and provided direction to human history as well as a hero's life. The arrival of Whitman's god (his
own "gross" Self, of course) ends only in the balking of all whispered confidences, and the huffy proposing of questions:
This hour I tell things in confidence.
I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.
Who goes there! hankering, gross, mystical, nude
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?
The fact that such seeming-simple questions are unanswerable is far less important than the sheer celebration of human energy
they contain. To proclaim the Self a divine animal is to replace a single hero's mortal courage with everyone's visionary daring.
In 1855 Whitman celebrates that change, believing that the power of his new verse derives in great measure from demolishing
the epic.
Whitman did not begin speaking of Leaves of Grass as an "attempt at utterance, of New World songs, and an epic of
Democracy" until his 1872 preface titled "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free." Evidence of his
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desire, in later life, to refashion his every accumulating volume as "an epic of Democracy" may be found everywhere. In 1867
he decided to begin each forthcoming edition of the Leaves with "One's Self I Sing," a new poem that, in form and content, is
clearly a proposition for an epic. (Lest readers should miss the point, he also added the phrase "and sing myself" to the first line
of his central poem.) In 1871 he added "As I Ponder'd in Silence" and "Song of the Exposition,'' both of which invoke a
"Phantom" muse of war poetry and then describe the migration of this external muse from Greece to America. "Song of the
Exposition" even claims, apparently seriously, that a traditionally feminine and statuesque muse can be uncovered amid such
glorious democratic products as steam whistles, gasometers, and artificial fertilizers ("Smiling and pleas'd with palpable intent to
stay, / She's here, installed among the kitchen ware!").
Ambitious poems like "Passage to India" and "Prayer of Columbus" now attempt, very much in Joel Barlow's fashion, to wed
both the poet's heroic vision and the advances of technology to the journeyings of Columbus. A late poem like "Old Chants"
positions Leaves of Grass at the end of a tradition beginning with the Hindu epics, proceeding through "The Iliad, Odyssey,
plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas" on down to Walter Scott and Tennyson. The poet who had once written "What is to be done
is to withdraw from precedents" thus insisted, at the last, upon linking his song to a whole list of epic predecessors while
dutifully noting "Of many debts incalculable / Haply our New World's chieftest debt is to old poems." As early as 1867, there is
pathetic evidence that Whitman's initial literary rebellion against the epic was exhausted. In his notebooks he added up the
number of words in Leaves of Grass in order to compare his total with those of five other texts: the Bible, The Iliad, The
Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost.
The writing of Leaves of Grass began in great heroic poetry that was not epic, and ended in bad "epic" verse that was not
heroic. It may be futile, however, for me to emphasize Whitman's insight that, at least in its first edition, Leaves of Grass was
"not epic." After all, Whitman was later to write many poems affirming America's cultural greatness; he was to combine them
into a massive book; he was to describe his own life's work as "an epic of democracy." Why bother to protest such a formidable
array of facts? Because it is crucial, in considering the claims upon epic advanced by later American poets, to try and determine
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which of these two Walt Whitmans has influenced them. Has twentieth-century thinking about the viability of epic poetry been
shaped primarily by Whitman's early need to transform the genre beyond recognition, or by his later need to adopt the epic as
the only way to lay claim to the authority of a popular bard who has truly made it new?
Antebellum forms of American epic literature were to be continuedand sometimes masterfully developedduring the closing
decades of the century. For sweet mercy's sake, no more than bibliographic mention should be made of the five imitative epic
poems published for the Columbian Quatrecentennial: John Campbell's Republica (1891), Henry Iliowizi's Quest of Columbus
(1892), Samuel Jefferson's Columbus: An Epic Poem (1892), John Howell's Columbus (1893), and Franklyn Quinby's The
Columbiad (1893at least the fourth poem of that title). At the height of the supposed age of "Realism," that supposed
"Naturalist" Frank Norris followed Cooper and Simms in defending the fictional Romance as the appropriate form of
impassioned poetry for the new era. The Octopus and The Pitwith their heroic epithets, triple adjectives, repeated formulaic
paragraphs, invocations of Force, and evocations of limitlessnesscarry out the restorative prospectus of Norris's essay "A
Neglected Epic" (1902). ''The stupendous conquering of the West . . . these mysterious race movements, migrations, wars and
wanderings . . . the last great event in the history of Civilization . . . has so far produced in the way of literature . . . the dime
novel and nothing better!" Francis Parkman's equally vast but stylistically restrained seven-part history, France and England in
North America (18651893), fully accepts Prescott's assumption that pre-Revolutionary racial and national wars of empire
comprise the New World's historical epic. Determined to cast the three-century foreground of the French and Indian Wars into
poetic prose, interesting narrative, and a properly international context, Parkman also acknowledged that Cooper's epic fiction, in
particular The Last of the Mohicans, "has had an influence in determining the course of my life and pursuits." Leslie Fiedler
contends that the African American search for liberation and roots has comprised, from the era of Harriet Beecher Stowe to the
era of Alex Haley, America's "inadvertent epic."
These are all literary projects whose conceptual origins, in differing ways and with unequal results, antedate the concerns of the
mid-nine-
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teenth century. In none of them do we find that joyous blending of the heroic and the mock epic, awe and satire, oral prophecy
and its own burlesque, that informs both Moby-Dick and "Song of Myself." Indeed, the later lives of both these writers suggest a
reseparation of epic from mock-epic that very nearly precludes humor. Just as Whitman sought to present himself anew through
recasting his "barbaric yawp" as an "epic of Democracy," so Melville moved away from "trying out" differing ways of
celebrating a tail (tale?) toward the grimly teleological concerns of Clarel (1876).
Among the many possible causes for the reseparation (Realism, Darwinism, "scientific" hierarchies of race, problems of the new
industrial order, etc.), the cataclysm of civil war held hideous primacy. Whatever "the American epic" had once been thought to
be, the writing of it had been linked to some kind of belief in the continuing promise of the nation's republican experiment. By
late 1865, it seemed evident that America had emerged intact from a war unprecedented in scale, in numbers of deaths, and in
instances of courageous self-sacrifice as well as of incompetence. But it was equally apparent that, late in 1861, the United
States of America had in fact ceased to exist. American writers drawn toward heroic literature were thus handed the grandest of
martial subjects in an unexpected and perhaps unusable form. Instead of the conquest of other races and other imperial powers
(Indians or Aztecs, French or Spanish), America's severest conflict, its bloodiest glory, had turned out to be a war among AngloAmericans over a "peculiar institution" widely thought to have been a national disgrace. No European or American epic had yet
been made of a civil war. To cast the South in the role of Satan, or the North in the role of invading Greeks, would not only
impede postwar reconciliation; it would degrade the national self.
As a nurse in Union hospitals, Whitman believed that the courage of the wounded and dying men he saw surpassed all poems,
"even the oldest and tearfullest . . . the old Greek mighty ones, where man contends with fate (and always yields)." By 1875,
Whitman became convinced that the Civil War was "the Vertebrer of Poetry and Art, (of personal character too) for all future
America (far more grand, in my opinion, to the hands capable of it, than Homer's siege of Troy)." And by the time Whitman
wrote "A Backward Glance" (1888) the Civil War had assumed such centrality in his thinking about the genesis of Leaves of
Grass that he insisted, quite erroneously, that his book could only
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"have emerged or been fashion'd . . . from the absolute triumph of the National Union arms."
Such anxious comparisons of the Trojan and Civil Wars show Whitman's need to demonstrate that his epic of democracy was
founded on a new and higher heroism. In the "Dram-Taps" section of Leaves of Grass, death has become final and no longer
"lucky," but no soldier can be called heroic simply because he knowingly died for baffle glory or even for honor. The young
men of "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," "A Sight in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," and ''The Wound Dresser"
have nobly suffered an unjust, unexpected death for the sake of restoring the mystic chords of Union. Although Whitman
carefully refrains from villainizing Southerners, he justifies the Civil War by seeing it as a purgative tragedy ending in national
progress. As in Barlow's Columbiad or James Russell Lowell's once widely read "Commemoration Ode," Progress is a
providential law dependent upon "the dependence of Liberty" and "the continuancy of Equality." The glory of reunion is
confirmed by will of the poet, but not created by the acts of the dead. Although Whitman's "Reconciliation" is a perfectly crafted
poem, it suggests that the face of the Southern enemy can somehow be washed white by the poet's kiss. Even poets as wary of
martial glory as Virgil and Milton would have had difficulty seeing "Drum Taps" as the onset of a new and higher heroism.
Whitman would convince us that to be the nation's wound-dresser, to bind wounds rather than to destroy evil, is to offer one's
individuality to the greater service of political reconciliation.
Melville's way of giving epic dimension to civil war incurred a different kind of difficulty. Expressing the same overview as
Whitman but in grimmer and more tentative terms, Melville offered, in his "Supplement" to Battle-Pieces, a prayer that the
Civil War might prove to have been a "terrible historic tragedy" that would verify the hopes of "the bards of Progress and
Humanity" by instructing "our whole beloved country through terror and pity." "The Conflict of Convictions" announces,
however, that national tragedy needs to be defined through epic analogy:
Return, return, O eager Hope,
And face man's latter fall.
Events, they make the dreamers quail;
Satan's old age is strong and hale,
A disciplined captain, gray in skill,
And Raphael a white enthusiast still.
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As the sequence of battle pieces proceeds, the import of historical events is repeatedly uncovered by direct Miltonic reference.
Slavery emerges as the new Dagon, Farragut as the new Moses, Grant as Michael, Richmond as Babylon, and so forth.
Unfortunately, Melville's attempt to elevate civil war by an accumulation of such analogies ultimately works against his hope
that Battle-Pieces will further national reconciliation. If Melville succeeds in convincing us that the South truly is Satan "gray in
skill," we can only wish to dismiss the serpent with a universal hiss, rejoicing that Right has finally conquered Wrong.
In a reversal of the antebellum pattern, late nineteenth-century novelists shunned all attempt to describe warfare in heightened
poetic prose. Neither John William De Forest (Miss Ravenel's Conversion, 1867) nor Winston Churchill (The Crisis, 1901)
connect their Civil War fictions with the epic, even though both novelists believed in heroism. The Red Badge of Courage begs
to be read as an ironic reversaland an implicit attackupon the consolatory words of the many "bards of Progress and Humanity"
who had been elevating the Civil War by handy references to tragedy and epic. Perhaps the fratricide was still of too recent
memory, or waving the bloody shirt was still too common, for epic fiction on the nation's cataclysm to reemerge, especially in
an era when Realism was increasingly fashionable.
Nonetheless, the Civil War was to be the subject of the only twentieth-century American epic poem that has been cherished and
widely read beyond the academy. Through 1957, Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body (1928) had sold at least 214,000
copies, only half of them in separate texts for college or secondary school use. Benét openly admired Frost and MacLeish, but
remained silent about Pound and Eliot. Expatriate years in Paris during the mid-twenties (John Brown's Body was written in
France) only made Benét more self-consciously an American. Through editing the Yale Literary Magazine, Benét established
connections with Henry Seidel Canby, John Farrar, Thornton Wilder, and Archibald MacLeish that would help his poem win a
Guggenheim, Book-of-the-Month Club publication, and the Pulitzer Prize. Benét, remained, however, very much the son of a
patriotic military family that had lived both North and South. His poetic roots and populist attitudes emerged directly from
Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg. Poetry, Benét insisted in a 1941 preface to John Brown's Body, "is meant to be heard. It is
meant for everybody, not only for the scholars. It is not a highly com-
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plicated puzzle box which you can open only with a special set of keys. . . . Poetry is open to any reader who likes the sound
and the swing of rhythm, the color and fire of words." Here clearly was a scholarly bard perfectly suited to join in affirming
"The People, Yes" as his nation moved reluctantly through isolationism toward a second World War. Raymond Massey read
John Brown's Body over the national airwaves in 1939; Benét chanted his poem at West Point and across the nation's college
campuses; when Benét died in 1944, he was widely mourned both as America's Union poet and as the Walt Whitman of our
times.
John Brown's Body honors the Union but not war. Glorification of fratricidal carnage in the name of Freedom's heavenprotected cause is exactly what Benét's poem does not offer us. Its hero is not murderous John Brown (the "stone" and "force" of
history) but Father Abraham conceived as a secular man of sorrows. The best use of soldiers' bibles has been, on rare occasion,
to stop a bullet:
There are no gods to come with a golden smoke
Here in the mud between the York and the James
And wrap some high-chinned hero away from death.
Attack upon the absent divinities of epic also informs the poem's satirical passages. Union congressmen with picnic lunches
overlooking the first battle of Bull Run have
Come out to see the gladiator's show
Like Iliad gods, wrapped in the sacred cloud
Of Florida water, wisdom and bay rum,
Of free cigars, democracy and votes.
Benét's poem begins with a lengthy "invocation" to a fleeting, shadowy "American muse" that can be glimpsed in mountains and
deserts, on plantations or bleak New England farms, in skyscrapers or even in "an immensity of wheel / Made up of wheels,
oiled with inhuman sweat," but not ever, apparently, in the actual moment of combat.
The genre of so popular a poem became an immediate issue. Although Benét preferred to avoid the word epic (referring to John
Brown's Body as "a long poem," "only a cup of silver air," and even as a "cyclorama"), Benét privately fretted that his "queer
start'' would make John Brown's Body "the most colossal flop since Barlow's Columbiad." Allen Tate, scornful of Benét's
reverence for Lincoln, promptly declared that "the poem is not in any sense an epic . . . it is a loose
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episodic narrative which unfolds a number of related themes in motionpicture flashes." Three months later Harriet Monroe
countered by turning the terms of Tate's denial into a way of transforming an old genre for a new age. John Brown's Body, she
proclaimed, is "a real book, a man-size book" precisely because it is "cinema epic," brilliant flashes in ever-changing meters, "a
super-journalistic epic" that frees us from all those conventions "associated too loftily with Homer and Virgil.'' Academics like
Dudley Fitz and Robert Morss Lovett equivocated by calling the poem, respectively, "an epyllion" and "an epic in intent." Alfred
Kreymborg was certain that the poetry of Benét and Hart Crane showed "renewed interest in epic forms" among American
poets. Fortunately, Benét found a new way of promoting "our singing strength" at exactly the moment (Kreymborg wrongly
predicted) when "one now wearies of Imagism."
Instead of arguing whether cinema could be incorporated into epic literature, reviewers in 1929 might well have considered
whether "epic" cinema was not about to assume the choric function once held by heroic poetry. For the continuation of epic
poetry, the abiding problem would be the mixing of kinds rather than the clash of lowbrow and highbrow. Although Benét was
no Imagist, he was enough of a Modernist to be unable to resolve the problem of combining flashing images and slow narrative.
The successes of his poem are the factual, vivid, and rapid images Benét recreates from history. Its insistent failures are the
plodding, dull narratives made of his characters' lives. Jack Ellyat the Connecticut Abolitionist and Clay Wingate the fiery
Georgia scion, Cudjo the happy Darky and Aunt Bess the loyal Mammy, Sally Dupré from Appleton Hall and Lucy Weatherby
the Virginia Belleall Benét's fictional characters are walking stereotypes with no trace of inner life. Anyone interested in their
true cultural coin should spend his or her time watching Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. The Bridge and Paterson
may lead us to question whether Modernist poetic epic can ever reach a wide audience without satisfying the need for narrative.
The disappearance of John Brown's Body from public view, however, suggests that a narrative verse epic will lose its impact
whenever a poet fabricates characters said to embody cultural legend. William Carlos Williams's way"a reply to Greek and Latin
with the bare hands"has at least given Paterson fit audience though few.
John McWilliams
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Further Reading
Barlow, Joel. The Works of Joel Barlow. Vol. 2, The Columbiad. Eds. W. K. Bottorff and A. L. Ford. Gainesville, Fla.:
Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970.
Benét, Stephen Vincent. John Brown's Body. New York Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
Bryan, Daniel. The Mountain Muse. Harrisonburg, Va.: Davidson and Bourne, 1813.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. Eds. J. A. Sappenfield and E. N. Feltskog. New York State University of
New York Press, 1983.
Emmons, Richard. The Fredoniad. Boston: William Emmons, 1827.
Fiedler, Leslie. The Inadvertent Epic: From "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Roots." New York Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel [1916]. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1971.
McWilliams, John P., Jr. The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 17701860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Eds. H. Hayford, H. Parker, and G. T. Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern-Newberry,
1988.
Miller, James E., Jr. The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1979.
Paulding, James Kirke. The Backwoodsman. Philadephia: M. Thomas, 1818.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960.
Prescott, William Hickling. History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru. New York Random House,
n.d.
Simms, William Gilmore. The Yemassee. New York Harper, 1835.
Walker, Jeffrey. Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Whitman, Wait. Leaves of Grass. Eds. H. W. Blodgett and S. Bradley. New York New York University Press, 1965.
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Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not merely the most popular American poet who ever lived but enjoyed a type of fame
almost impossible to imagine by contemporary standards. His books not only sold well enough to make him rich; they sold so
consistently that he eventually became the most popular living author in any genre in nineteenth-century America. His readers
spanned every social class from laborers to royalty, from professors to politicians. A vast, appreciative audience read, reread,
and memorized his poems. His work quickly became part of school curricula. It also entered the fabric of domestic and public
lifeto be recited in parlors and intoned at civic ceremonies. Many of his lines became so much a part of English that even a
century and a half later people who have never read Longfellow quote him unawares: "Ships that pass in the night," "Footprints
on the sands of time," "When she was good, she was very, very good," "The patter of little feet.'' Language remembers the
poems its speakers love best, even if only as clichés.
Longfellow's fame was not limited to the United States. He was the first American poet to achieve an international reputation.
England hailed him as the New World's first great bard. His admirers included Charles Dickens, William Gladstone, John
Ruskin, and Anthony Trollope as well as the British royal family and their notoriously anti-American poet laureate, Alfred
Tennyson. But Longfellow's fame went beyond the English-speaking world. His work traveled throughout Europe and Latin
America in translation. When the playboy emperor
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of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, visited America, he asked to dine with Longfellow (and returned the hospitality by translating "King
Robert of Sicily" into Portuguese). King Victor Emmanuel offered him a medal (which the poet declined). Charles Baudelaire
adapted part of The Song of Hiawatha into the rhymed alexandrines of "Le Calumet de Paix." Franz Liszt set the "Prologue" of
The Golden Legend to music. In England he eventually outsold Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson once bragged to a friend that
he made two thousand pounds a year from poetry, then grumbled, "But Longfellow, alas, receives three thousand.'' Three years
after his death Longfellow's bust was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminister Abbey, the first and only time an American
poet has received this honor.
Longfellow's popularity did not prevent him from receiving the esteem of literati; in his lifetime they generally regarded him as
the most distinguished poet America had produced. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who held him just this side of idolatry, put him "at the
head of our list of native poets." William Dean Howells considered him the one American poet who ranked with Tennyson and
Browning. Even Edgar Allan Poe, his most outspoken critic, repeatedly referred to his "genius." His other admirers included
Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, and Abraham Lincoln. By late middle
age he had become the public symbol of American cultural achievement. In 1881, the year before his death, his birthday was
celebrated nationwide in schools with recitations and performances. "Surely," a friend told him, "no poet was ever so fully
recognized in his lifetime as you."
Longfellow's fame was not merely literary. His poetry exercised a broad cultural influence that today seems more typical of
movies or popular music than anything we might imagine possible for poetry. His poems became subjects for songs, choral
work, operas, musicals, plays, paintings, symphonies, pageants, and eventually films. Evangeline, for instance, was adapted into
an opera, a cantata, a tone poem, a song cycle, and even a touring musical burlesque show. Later, it became a movie three
timesthe last in 1929 starring Dolores del Rio, who sang two songs to celebrate Longfellow's arrival in talkies. "The Village
Blacksmith" became a film at least eight times, if one counts cartoons and parodies, including John Ford's 1922 adaptation,
which updated the protagonist into an auto mechanic. The Song of Hiawatha
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not only provided American artists, composers, cartoonists, and directors with a popular subject, it gave Anton Dvorák * the
inspiration for two movements of his "New World" symphony. It also provided the Anglo-African composer, Samuel Coleridge
Taylor, with texts for three immensely popular cantatas, which until World War II were performed annually in a two-week
festival at Royal Albert Hall by almost a thousand British choristers dressed as Indians. Hiawatha's cultural currency was so high
that it was not only translated into virtually every modern European language but also into Latin. It was even recast as English
prosethe way a popular movie today is "novelized" in paperbackand it eventually became a comic book. "Paul Revere's Ride"
prompted too many adaptions to list, though Grant Wood's witty version underlines the poem's status as a national icon. Charles
Ives's setting of "The Children's Hour" (later choreographed by Jerome Robbins for Ives Songs) may also have a touch of irony,
but it mainly luxuriates in the poem's celebration of domesticity, for Longfellow's emotional directness appealed immensely to
composers. There are over seven hundred musical settings of his work in the Bowdoin College Library.
One could go on, but I trust that by now there has been something in my catalogue of Longfellow's fame and influence to offend
critics of every persuasion. Book sales and royalty figures! Patronage of kings and emperors! Comic books and movies! Dolores
del Rio and red-faced English choirs! These are not valuable tokens in establishing a poet's literary merit. I offer this welter of
anecdote not to argue the intrinsic worth of Longfellow's poetry, which I believe is considerable, but to make a simple point.
There is something singularly odd in Longfellow's case that makes him extraordinarily difficult for contemporary critics to
discuss: he is as much a part of our history as of our literature. To approach the place he occupies at the center of midnineteenth-century American culture a critic must cross a minefield of explosive issues: the nature of popular art, American
culture's relationship to England and Europe, the social and economic assumptions of the Genteel Tradition, Christianity's place
in art, the legacy of Modernism, the critical evaluation of formal and narrative poetry, the validity of didactic poetry, the literary
status of poems that require no explication, the representation of females, blacks, and Native Americans by white male authors.
One could go on here as well, but this catalogue is already
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alarmingly long. The collective lesson it holds is that to evaluate Longfellow fairly we must first recognize the historical chasm
that separates his age from our own.
If Whitman and Dickinson stand at the beginning of modern American literary consciousness, Longfellow represents the
culmination of an earlier tradition. To approach him postmodern readers must make the same sort of mental adjustments they do
in studying Chaucer or Milton. The necessary adjustments, however, are harder to make in Longfellow's case because,
paradoxically, heand his fellow Fireside poetsstill feel so familiar. They still connect so easily to parts of American public
culture. But what Longfellow connects to is popular culture; once we bring him into the context of contemporary high culture,
especially academic literary criticism, his liberal Christian humanist assumptions seem uncomfortably dated. In intellectual
discourse that valorizes indeterminacy, self-referentiality, and deconstruction, Longfellow's aesthetic has more in common with
that of Virgil or Ovid than with the assumptions of Beckett or Ashbery. But unlike Virgil and Ovid, who today exist almost
solely as objects of academic study, Longfellow refuses to stay in the tiny cell critics have afforded him. He can still be
sightedto the scholar's embarrassmentprowling at large in the general culture.
Although he is no longer widely taught in schools, Longfellow remains the one poet the average, nonbookish American still
knows by heartnot whole poems but memorable snatches. Most English-speaking Americans can quote the openings of at least
five Longfellow anthology pieces, even if they don't always know the author or title: "The Village Blacksmith," "Paul Revere's
Ride," Evangeline, "Hiawatha's Departure," and "The Arrow and the Song." What? You don't know the last one? Yes, you do''I
shot an arrow into the air,/ It fell to earth, I know not where." Most people have never read these poems. They have picked them
up as part of American oral culture along with proverbs, schoolyard chants, nursery rhymes, and campfire songs. Many
Americans over sixty, members of a generation that did learn Longfellow in school, can quote whole swatches of poems like
"Psalm of Life," "Excelsior," or "The Wreck of the Hesperus," the recitation favorites of yesteryear. Few common readers will
share the scholar's surprise that Wallace Stevens's wife, Elsie, preferred Longfellow's poems to her husband's.
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Almost every poet has a Longfellow anecdote. Let me tell you mine. During the nearly seventeen years I worked in business, I
assiduously tried to keep my after-hours literary activity a secret, but after a decade the embarrassing news leaked out. During
the next few weeks various colleagues dropped into my office to ask if I really did write poetry. When I admitted my secret
vice, an odd thing happenedon four separate occasions my visitors began to recite Longfellow. It was their way of letting me
know poetry was OK by them. One accountant made it halfway through "The Wreck of the Hesperus." A senior executive
intoned the opening of Evangeline in sonorous, if exaggerated, hexameter. No one ever quoted any other author. Longfellow
was the one poet they knew by heart.
If Longfellow achieved the apogee of literary fame in his lifetime, and if his reputation still persists, however diminished, among
the general public, what is the current status of his reputation among literati? The answer would have dumbfounded his
contemporaries: Longfellow, if he is noted at all, is now considered a minor poet of the Genteel Tradition. If he has not yet sunk
to the status of an embarrassing historical footnote like Ossian or Chatterton, he stands only marginally higher among academic
critics. His long poems are unread and undiscussed; he exists precariously as the author of half a dozen short lyrics found only
in the thickest anthologies. He has gradually become more a name to recognize, like William Cowper or Leigh Hunt, than an
author to read. He is most definitely not an author for ambitious critics to write about. Few recent books on American poetry
mention Longfellow except in passing; almost none discuss him at any length. The centenary of his death was celebrated by a
single volume of scholarly papers printed, significantly, not by a university press but by the U.S. Government. So little, in fact,
has been written on Longfellow recently that for years Kermit Vanderbilt and later George Hendrick made the critical dearth
into a sort of running gag in successive volumes of American Literary Scholarship. "Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves
ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow's popular rhymings," Vanderbilt characteristically quipped. The current version of
nineteenth-century American poetry has no place for its once preeminent figure. Contemporary taste does not esteem the genres
Longfellow favoredthe ballad, idyll, pastoral romance, and moral fablenor does it highly regard the stylistic strengths his
contemporaries praisedclarity, grace, musicality, mas-
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terful versification, and memorability. These are not attributes that fit easily into the traditions of Emerson, Whitman, and
Dickinson. In short, the status of Longfellow's reputation among literati is a subject less suited to a critic than an elegist.
Nowhere can the decline of Longfellow's critical reputation be measured more clearly than in his representation in serious
historical anthologies. (In popular anthologies like Hazel Felleman's Best Loved Poems of the American People his popularity
continues more or less undiminished.) The three versions of The Oxford Book of American Verse provide an exemplary
illustration. Bliss Carman's original 1927 anthology gives more space to Longfellow than any other poet, seventeen poems
spread across 37 pages. F. O. Matthiessen's considerably larger 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse, which ran 1,132 pages to
Carman's 680, prints fourteen poems occupying 39 pages. But now Emerson, Whitman, Robinson, Frost, and Stevens have more
space than he does. Longfellow consequently occupies a different position in the American canon; he is not the central
nineteenth-century master but instead the greatest of the Fireside poets. By the time Richard Ellmann edited The New Oxford
Book of American Verse in 1976, Longfellow's decline was complete. He now has only eleven poems and a little over 12 pages.
Thirty-five other poets have as much or more space. Even Jones Very and James Russell Lowell outrank him in the nineteenthcentury canon. Overall Longfellow occupies about the same number of pages as Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and John
Ashbery, considerably less than Denise Levertov or Galway Kinnell. How are the mighty fallen! But it is not merely the size of
Longfellow's representation but its constitution that is most revealing. Ellmann includes no narrative poems in his selection
(unless one considers the "Introduction" to The Song of Hiawatha narrative), whereas Carman and Matthiessen felt Longfellow
should be represented by such narrative poems as "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Birds of Killingworth," and ''The Monk of CasalMaggiore." Ellmann reduces him to a lyric poet. Perverse as this version of Longfellow might have seemed to a nineteenthcentury reader, Ellmann merely followed the current critical consensus, which downgraded most American narrative poetry,
especially Longfellow's. The third edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1970), for example, also excluded Longfellow's
narratives; it reprinted only six poemsall lyrics, three of them sonnets.
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If Longfellow had been "downsized" in historical anthologies, he had become invisible in most other textbooks. The format of
historical anthologies forces an editor to balance his or her individual views against the consensus of the past; no once important
author, however unfashionable, is easily omitted. But the general anthologist has no similar restraints. If one examines the three
leading nonhistorical college poetry textbooksX. J. Kennedy's An Introduction to Poetry, John F. Nims's Western Wind: An
Introduction to Poetry, and Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense, one will find not a single poem by Longfellow, only disjecta
membraisolated lines used to illustrate points of rhetoric and rhythm. According to William Harmon's 1990 Concise Columbia
Book of Poetry, no poem by Longfellow currently ranks among the top one hundred most-frequently anthologized poems in
English. Insofar as university-based readers are concerned, Longfellow has become a marginal figure.
Modern literary criticism on Longfellow hardly exists in the sense that it does for more overtly difficult poets like Dickinson,
Stevens, or Pound. There is no substantial body of commentary on specific poems, no vital tradition of critical discourse that
collectively sharpens our reading and challenges our preconceptions. The unspoken assumption, even among his advocates, has
been that Longfellow's poetry requires no gloss. Consequently, many central aspects of his work have never been examined in
any detail (the linguistic stylization and rhetoric of Hiawatha, for example) and misconceptions about his work abound. The
best Longfellow scholarship often has a decidedly old-fashioned feel; it traces historical sources, clarifies textual problems, and
connects biographical data to the poems. Such criticism addresses a small group of nineteenth-century specialists rather than the
general readership for American poetry; it implicitly ducks the issue of Longfellow's relevance to contemporary letters. On the
rare occasions Longfellow criticism has spoken eloquently to a broader audienceas in essays by Horace Gregory, Howard
Nemerov, and Leslie Fiedlerhis champions have usually been more concerned with the general mission of keeping him, however
marginally, in the canon than with examining specific features of his work. Since Longfellow's work now largely exists in a
critical vacuum, one must begin any serious examination of his work with a few basic observations about the unusual nature of
his poetic development and the strange combination of circumstances that brought this multi-talented literary man into poetry.
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The smooth progress of Longfellow's academic career has led his critics to miss how extraordinarily unusual his literary
apprenticeship was among nineteenth-century American poets. He began writing verse in early adolescencenothing odd
therepublishing his first poem at thirteen in the local Portland Gazette. At Bowdoin College he applied himself seriously to
writing and encountered immediate success. During his three years in college he published nearly forty poems. Certain of his
literary vocation, Longfellow faced the obvious problem of how to make a living. His father, a successful lawyer from a family
of lawyers and legislators, wanted his gifted son to study for the bar. Longfellow hoped to become a journalist, but struck a
compromise with his affectionate parent: he would pursue a legal career if allowed a year of graduate study at Harvard to learn
Italian and perfect his French.
At graduation Longfellow met with one of the many strokes of good luck that would characterize his literary career. The trustees
of Bowdoin had decided to create a chair in the new field of Modern Languages. (It would become the fourth such program in
the United States after William and Mary, Harvard, and the University of Virginia.) With extraordinary boldness and insight the
trustees offered the future professorship to the eighteen-year-old Longfellow, whose talent and earnest application had
impressed them, under the condition that he pursue graduate study in Europe. The improbable offer saved the young poet, who
then knew only Greek, Latin, and a smattering of French, from his father's profession.
When the nineteen-year-old Longfellow boarded the Cadmus in May 1826 to sail for Havre, something significant happenedhe
stopped writing poems. The silence would last for the next eleven years. Most poets spend their twenties mastering their
medium, usually by writing reams of verse that carry them from juvenilia into artistic maturity. Longfellow also dedicated this
crucial decade to learning his craft, but in a different way from his American contemporaries: he studied European languages
and literature, he translated an astonishing range of poetryusually in its original meters, he wrote prose of every variety from
fiction and memoir to grammar textbooks and literary criticism. When he returned to original poetry in late 1837 he had
developed an unprecedented combination of skills for an American poeta deep knowledge of European literature, a practical
experience with dozens of poetic genres and forms from his work in translation, a
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trained critical mind, and an assured authorial voice developed by publishing a considerable amount of prose, most notably
Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (1835), his autobiographical travelogue.
The factors that pushed Longfellow back into poetry have not been adequately explored by his biographers. His brother Samuel,
who compiled the first, largely documentary biography in 1886, romantically assumed that the creative release came when the
poet first moved into Craigie House, the elegant Cambridge manse that he would eventually own and occupy for the remaining
forty-five years of his life. Herbert Gorham offers the more interesting theory that Longfellow's immersion in European
literature during the previous ten years instilled in him an anxiety about the difficulty for an American artist to equal the Old
World's tradition. Longfellow used the decade of scholarship to assimilate his influences, Gorham maintains, before his new
situation in Cambridge unleashed his long-simmering imagination. Newton Arvin hardly examines the issue but implicitly
assumes that Longfellow's less demanding and more congenial situation at Harvard allowed him time to rediscover poetry.
There is truth in all of these observations, but certainly two other events sent Longfellow back to poetryone tragic, the other
mundane.
The tragic impetus was the sudden death of his first wife, Mary, during his second European sojourn in 1836. This trip had
begun as a professional triumph for Longfellow. He had just accepted the Smith Chair in Modern Languages at Harvard, a
position that not only gave him lighter duties and a larger salary than Bowdoin but also an escape from the intellectual isolation
of Brunswick, Maine. Harvard's president, Joseph Quincy, had suggested that Longfellow return to Europe to perfect his
German before assuming the chair. Eager to revisit Europe in his wife's company, Longfellowagainst his father's adviceset sail.
In Copenhagen, Mary, who was expecting their first child, took ill. They journeyed to Amsterdam where she miscarried and,
after three week's confinement, seemed to recover. In Rotterdam she suddenly took ill again and died. Longfellow plunged into
grief so profound that it pierced his customary reticence. "All day I am weary and sad," he confided to his diary, "and at night I
cry myself to sleep like a child." When Longfellow arrived in Cambridge in December 1836 to begin his eighteen-year tenure at
Harvard, he was a widower moving to a new city. He faced the external challenge of creating a new social identity and the
internal struggle of redefining himself as a writer.
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Scholarship could not bear the psychic weight of Longfellow's grief nor adequately address his need for self-definition. Almost
as soon as he returned from Europe he began composing his autobiographical Hyperion: A Romance (1839), and within the year
he had resumed writing poetry. From this time on Professor Longfellow would be primarily an imaginative writer.
The death of Longfellow's first wife has been overshadowed by the more public and horrifying death by fire of his second wife.
Longfellow wrote nothing about his first wife's death beyond a few letters and journal entries, so no adequate record exists of
this crucial period. "With me," he wrote in an early letter, "all deep feelings are silent ones." But seven years after Mary's death
he revisited Germany and wrote the only poem that apparently alludes to his grief, "Mezzo Cammin." One of Longfellow's
finest poems, the sonnet lay unpublished in his papers until after his death. (Many scholars, including the editors of the Norton
anthologies, mistakenly assume that it appeared in the 1846 collection, The Belfrey of Bruges; the sonnet took its place there
only posthumously with the publication of the Complete Poems). Longfellow, the most reticent of poets, seems to have
considered it too personal to publish, and perhaps he also felt it was indelicate to memorialize his first wife while he courted a
second, Fanny Appleton, whom he married in 1843. It is tempting to read ''Mezzo Cammin" in an overtly autobiographical way,
as describing Longfellow's despair at having wasted so much of his life and confessing the spiritual paralysis following Mary's
death.
Mezzo Cammin
Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past
Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,
A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,
And hear above me on the autumnal blast
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.
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The sonnet borrows its fide from the opening line of Dante's Inferno, "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," which Longfellow
himself later translated as "Midway upon the journey of our life." Dante uses this metaphor to describe the age of thirty-five, the
halfway point in the Bible's allotted span of human life, "three-score years and ten." The precise dating of this Italian sonnet in
Longfellow's papers makes it clear he composed it at thirty-five, and the sonnet's speaker is also explicitly at the midpoint in his
life and presumably, like Dante, lost in a dark wood of spiritual confusion. The first quatrain specifies the speaker's particular
failurehe is an artist who has not realized his youthful ambition of lyric achievement. The second quatrain also specifies the
reason for his failure; it is not indolence nor dissipation nor restlessness but a nearly fatal grief to blame. Yet already the failure
is significantly qualified since his aspirations remain something the speaker "may accomplish yet." What makes this poem
unusual for Longfellow is the final sestet. Rather than resolving the speaker's predicament, instead it amplifies the dilemma. The
lines vividly describe how the protagonist is caught inescapably between the unrecoverable but still visible past and his distant
but nonetheless inevitable death.
Few of Longfellow's poems end in such an indeterminate way. It may not have been only the poem's personal nature that led
Longfellow to suppress it but also its dark and ambiguous conclusion. The sonnet, however, suggests at least two things about
Longfellow in 1842 that one would not have said before his wife's death: first, he is now certain of his poetic vocation, and
second, the awareness of his own mortality spurs his creative resolve.
The more mundane impetus to poetry was Longfellow's hard-earned economic security. Assuming the Smith Chair at Harvard,
Longfellow had reached, at an unusually early age, the height of his profession. His years of academic toil had justified him in
the eyes of his parents and the world. He now had a dependable income and was settled in a congenial spot. To a dutiful and
diligent son from a middle-class family like Longfellow, these were not trivial considerations. If Longfellow eventually became
the first American poet who could live off his royalties, we must not forget how economically marginal verse was in the early
nineteenth century. William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis and Other Poems (1821), a volume that critics of yesteryear often cited
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as the first great book of American verse, earned its author $14.92 during its first five years. A charmingly symbolic sum for an
American poet, but even then it wasn't much to live on. Longfellowlike Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot sixty years laterwas
essentially a bourgeois artist who needed a stable income and an orderly external routine to have the psychic freedom to create.
Whatever ambiguity existed about the young Longfellow's poetic vocation, there could be no doubt about his literary calling.
When his first collection of poems, Voices of the Night, appeared in December 1839 the thirty-two-year-old author had already
written or edited nine volumes: six small textbooks in Spanish, Italian, and French; a book of verse translation, the Coplas de
Don Jorge Manrique (1832), which also included versions of Lope de Vega, Aldana, and Berceo; and two substantial prose
works, Outre-Mer and Hyperion. He had also published a great many essays, scholarly articles, stories, and translations. Despite
the demands of his academic career, Longfellow had demonstrated that he was a serious, indeed a compulsive, writer. Critics
commonly fault Longfellow for not growing as a poet, as if change itself were an intrinsic sign of greatnesshow many poets like
Wordsworth and Swinburne or, more recently, Sexton, Lowell, and Dickey, have changed for the worse? Indeed, Longfellow's
verse shows little major development across his career except for the increasing sophistication of his narrative technique and
greater austerity in the late lyrics. It would, however, be more accurate to say that his early artistic growth occurred in other
literary forms. The young Longfellow is found not in poetry but in Outre-Mer, Hyperion, and his scattered short stories. By the
time he returned to poetry in his thirtiesearly middle age by nineteenth-century standardshe had already gone through complex,
though unusual, artistic development.
Voices of the Night was one of the strangest debuts in American poetry. It contained nine new poems followed by seven poems
rescued from Longfellow's teenage years. The bulk of the volume consisted of over twenty translations, including the lengthy
"Coplas de Manrique," three substantial passages from Dante's Purgatorio, and diverse poems from Spanish, French, German,
Danish, and Anglo-Saxon. The mixture of original and translated poems, the Greek epigraphs, the varied verse forms make the
collection resemble an early volume of Ezra Pound more than anything typical of nineteenth-century America. The archi-
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tecture of the volume (underscored by Longfellow's programmatic "Prelude") explicitly announced the return to poetry of an
author who had mastered the traditions of Europe.
In Voices of the Night Longfellow created an influential new archetype in American culturethe poet professor. There had been
versifying professors before Longfellow, but their occupation seemed incidental to their art. Longfellow's range and erudition
marked a shift in the poet's cultural role from literary amateur to professional artist; poetry was no longer a pastime but an
occupation requiring a lifetime of study. A century and a half later the poet professor remains one of the four common
stereotypes for the American poet that permeate both high and popular culturethe others being the bohemian vagabond (Walt
Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, Allen Ginsberg), the reclusive outsider (Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens), and
the self-destructive fiery genius (Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Weldon Kees). Although the New Critics
despised Longfellow, these poet professors were his cultural descendants.
There is another side of Longfellow's version of the poet professor that has been decisively influential. Longfellow's public
personaarticulated both in his books and in his new university positionwas a figure of immense literary authority, a sensibility
capable of both critical and creative activity, an intelligence embracing both "the mind of Europe" and the potential of America.
If the description sounds as if it were borrowed from T. S. Eliot, the resemblance is not accidental. Longfellow was the first
American poet both to define his literary identity and to build its authority by systematically assimilating European literaturenot
just British or classical verse but, to quote Eliot, "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer." Although Longfellow and
Eliot would have charted the high points of that tradition differently, what matters is that they shifted the poet's frame of cultural
reference from Anglo-American to European literature. If this turn toward European models came in part from nationalistic
assertion, it also derived from a visionary sympathy for Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur, the dialectic by which national
literatures would gradually merge into a universal concert. Longfellow's vision of the American poet's international role was
central to both Pound and Eliot, and it remains a dominant force in American poetry (locked, of course, in eternal, dialectical
opposition with nativism).
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Although Eliot did not take his mission directly from Longfellow, he developed it in the Harvard humanities curriculum that
Longfellow helped create. Pound absorbed Longfellow's vision as part of his family heritage. Although he hated to acknowledge
the connection, Pound was Longfellow's grandnephew. Rejecting his illustrious forebear's aesthetics, he nonetheless
wholeheartedly embraced Longfellow's notion of the poet's education, especially the importance of learning poetry in foreign
languages and mastering verse technique. Pound also shared Longfellow's conviction in the continuity of American and
European culture and in the artistic integrity of poetic translation. Through Eliot and Pound the American poet's destiny as heir
to European culture filtered to subsequent generations. It was the role W. H. Auden assumed in his initial American phase with
ambitious long culture poems like "New Year Letter" and "For the Time Being." In a more restricted way it also shaped the
intellectual identity of mid-century poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Kenneth Rexroth, Weldon Kees, and Randall
Jarrell, who saw themselves as mediators between American and European culture. Look, for example, at Jarrell's translations of
the Brothers Grimm, Goethe, Rilke, and Chekhov. One sees a similar internationalism in the next generation, among poets as
dissimilar as Roberty Bly, James Wright, William Jay Smith, and Richard Wilburthough it began to expand more noticeably
beyond Eurocentric models. Although they may not have thought of their work in these terms, those poets continued a poetic
tradition pioneered by Longfellow in Voices of the Night.
If Longfellow did not yet recognize his proper literary medium, the critics and the public did. While Hyperion, which had been
published five months earlier, met with generally lukewarm and occasionally hostile reviews, Voices of the Night was an
immediate success. Within weeks the first edition sold out. (There would be six printings in the first two years.) The North
American Review claimed that Longfellow's poemsand remember there were only nine new ones plus a slight "Envoi"were
"among the most remarkable poetic compositions, which have ever appeared in the United States." In a letter Nathanial
Hawthorne gushed, "Nothing equal to some of them was ever written in this world,this western world, I mean." Even while
criticizing the volume on other grounds, Poe, who would make a personal mission of attacking Longfellow (sometimes
anonymously or pseudonymously), singled
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out "Hymn to the Night" for extravagant praise. The poem, he predicted, would be "the greatest favorite with the public."
Typically, Poe sagaciously identified the book's best poem but misjudged the public's taste. Reviewers and readers alike had
already discovered their favorite"Psalm of Life"which would quickly become one of the century's most popular poems, not only
in America and England but also, in translation, as far away as Russia, Iran, and China.
A scholar could compile a small anthology of apologies for this poetic chestnut. Only four years after the poet's death his
brother Samuel wrote, "It has perhaps grown too familiar for us to read it as it was first read." Most of Longfellow's twentiethcentury defendersAlfred Kreymborg, Horace Gregory, Howard Nemerov, Newton Arvin, Louis Untermeyer, and othershave
taken special pains to distance themselves from those "nine jingling verses, dripping with a larger number of clichés than any
other poem in the language," that, Kreymborg observed, "smote the heartstrings of the race." "Psalm of Life." Longfellow's
admirers have repeatedly asserted, is not the Longfellow they admire. Consequently, the poem has been banished from college
anthologies and ''serious" selections from the poet's work, unless, as in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding
Poetry (the locus classicus of Modernist Longfellow criticism), it was used to represent what poetry should not bea sugar-coated
pill offering "truth" to readers by displaying "fine sentiments in fine language."
Surely every criticism ever aimed at "Psalm of Life" is, on some level, true. Yet, despite repeated assassination attempts by
some of the best hit men in modern letters, this menacingly upbeat poem refuses to die. Banished from the curriculum for nearly
a century, perhaps the poem is now just unfamiliar enough to show why it persists. As Daniel Little-field, Jr., has demonstrated,
the poem's popularity came because not despite its didacticism. "Psalm of Life" draws its identity from the colonial tradition of
aphorisms in such works as The Proverbs, The New England Primer, and Poor Richard's Almanack. Kreymborg was more
correct than perhaps he knew in noting that the poem contained "a larger number of clichés than any other poem in the
language." If one substitutes the word aphorism or proverb for cliché (and one person's proverb is another's cliché), we get
close to the source of the poem's most famous mental health hazardits extraordinary memorability. By compressing the
maximum number of sensible and uplifting proverbs
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into what is probably the most mnemonically seductive meter in English, trochaic tetrameter (the measure, for example, of
Blake's "The Tyger"), and rhyming every end-stopped line, Longfellow created a masterpiece of Yankee Unitarian agitprop.
"Psalm of Life" fails as lyric poetry because it belongs to a different genre, inspirational didactic verse. Anglo-American
Modernism banished overt didacticism from high art; indeed rejecting didactism was the first inkling of English Modernism in
the 1890s. The didactic genre still exists, though in popular culture its form has shifted to prose; our contemporary equivalent is
the self-help bookand poets still occasionally write them. Our "Psalm of Life" is Iron John.
The success of Longfellow's second verse collection, Ballads and Other Poems (1841), determined his literary future. While he
would still occasionally undertake fiction and scholarly prose, he soon conceded to the wisdom of the marketplace. With the
exception of his unsuccessful novel, Kavanagh: A Tale (1849), and the critical apparatus to his major translations, virtually all of
his subsequent work would be in verse. Ballads and Other Poems also helped define Longfellow's poetic gifts both to himself
and his public. If Voices in the Night revealed his mastery of the delicate lyric and his dexterity as a translator, the new volume
revealed his other great strengthstorytelling. Narrative poetry was the prime source of Longfellow's immense popularity. His
superiority at creating compelling storiesclearly, movingly, and memorablywas his chief virtue in the eyes of his contemporaries
and today it poses the chief obstacle to his appreciation among contemporary critics. What caused such a divergence of opinion?
The answer is obviousModernism.
Modernism declared narrative poetry at best obsolete and at worst a contradiction in terms. By prizing compression, intensity,
complexity, and ellipsis, it cultivated an often hermetic aesthetic inimical to narrative poetry. Perfecting poetry's private voice,
Modernismat least American Modernismlost the art's public voice. In many ways what we now call Modernist poetry was a
collaboration between poets and critics. If there was an unmatched explosion of poetic talent between 1910 and 1940, there was
also, just slightly later, an unprecedented efflorescence of critical intelligence, which developed ways of reading the challenging
new verse. Among their many accomplishments the
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critical champions of American Modernism established the movement's genealogy in nineteenth-century literature. Three
unfortunate consequences of this critical enterprise, however, were a narrow reconstruction of pre-Modernist American poetry,
the development of analytical techniques that were useless in approaching verse narrative, and the identification of poetry with
the lyric mode. Searching for the American precedents of Modernism, critics gradually narrowed the diverse traditions of pretwentieth-century poetry to three-and-a-half major authors: Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, andreluctantly, for the Symbolist's
sakethe critical half of Poe. Linking this purified canon to Modernism, the New Critics and their successors masterfully
demonstrated the American genius for the lyric (in all its high culture varieties) and the non-narrative epic (the exploratory
culture poem like Leaves of Grass, The Cantos, and Paterson). The simplified version of nineteenth-century American poetry
that grew out of this critical tradition excludes so much interesting and enduring work that its continuing currency says less
about what the era was actually like than how powerful Modernism still is in influencing our perceptions of the past.
No writers have suffered more from Modernism's revision of American poetry than Longfellow and Whittler. They represent the
traditional aesthetic Modernism defined itself against. Consequently, they have been doubly damned. Not only have critics
dismissed most of their poetry but their very poetic enterprise has been declared trivialtheir chief genres marginalized, their
prosody dismissed, their public voice deemed vulgar. The roots of the misunderstanding are too complex to examine fully here,
but at its center are issues of genre, versification, and audience, all linked to the university's near monopoly over critical
discourse. In a critical culture where literary merit is a function of how much discourse (in classrooms or learned journals) a
poetic text can generate, their expansive and lucid poems have little to offer. William Butler Yeats observed that Longfellow's
popularity came because "he tells his story or idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it." Karl Keller
claimed that "Whittier has been a writer to love, not to belabor." These are lethal verdicts in today's academy. But what does a
reader say about a theory of poetry that has no room for Whittier's "Snow-Bound" or Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn?
There is something amiss in a literary culture that serves critics to the detriment of readers.
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The mistake that most of Longfellow's advocates have made over the past half century is attempting to justify his work by
Modernism's standards rather than insisting it be approachedas one would other poets separated by a significant historical gapon
its own terms. The author who emerges from this doomed defense is a gifted lyric poet, perhapsas Richard Wilbur suggests, "the
best sonneteer of his century"but he remains a decidedly minor figure next to Browning or Tennyson, Dickinson or Whitman.
Once we begin to assess Longfellow on his own terms, as a master of lyric and narrative poetry, of translation and adaptation, an
innovator in versification and the creator of national myths, he stands as the most versatile American poet of his century.
Dickinson and Whitman surpass him in depth and intensity but no one equals his range. In his chosen field, verse narrative, he is
unequalled in American poetry until E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost. His achievement in lyric poetry is less dramatic but in
some ways more unusual.
Longfellow's faults as a lyric poet are too well known to belabor. His work often lacks intellectual depth. It often strays into
sentimentality. His poems too often seem to begin from set conclusions rather than to discover themselves in their own
imaginative process. He rarely passes up the opportunity to moralize. He is often derivative of European models. He sometimes
becomes so engrossed in his metrical scheme that he loses the intensity of his poetic impulse. He rarely looks into the harsher
side of reality. These are all fair criticisms, and I will add one more: Longfellow's imagination was so linear that it lacked the
ability to work dialectically. His poems rarely unfold as dynamic arguments; he could not present and reconcile truly opposed
points of view. This failing may partially account for the meekness that pervades so many of his poems; he could not offset his
own gentle nature with a credible vision of darkness. But having catalogued Longfellow's faults, one must also point out that
many of these failings are the other sides of certain virtues. The sentimentality of his worst poems comes from the same
emotional directness that animates his best work. His lack of intellectual complexity is a chief strength of his popular poems and
most delicate lyrics. Recognizing Longfellow's virtues amid the welter of his salient shortcomings, however, is complicated by
at least two factors: he was an immensely prolific and uneven poet, most of whose work is blandly unmemorable; the cultural
assumptions he made about poetry differ significantly from our own.
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Longfellow's lyric poetry divides into two groups. There are the songlike poems written in a popular style, which is smooth,
direct, and quick moving, and there are the crafted literary poems, which are stately, complex, and densely textured. The
popular poems usually have simple syntax and they match their phrasing nearly to the line lengths. The literary poems show
more complex syntax and risk stronger enjambments at the line breaks. Longfellow also differentiated the poems metrically. The
popular poems usually move in stress meter, triple feet or trochees; quite often they work in a loose ballad meter with an
alternating pattern of four and three stresses per line. The literary poems almost always move in rhymed iambic pentameter, a
meter Longfellow used less than most major English-language poets. The popular poems often have complex, songlike stanzas
with shifting line lengths and unusual rhyme schemes; they often have refrains. Longfellow, like the Elizabethan lyricists,
understood that if a poet keeps the sense simple he can make the music compellingly complex. The literary poems invariably
employ a standard line length and simple rhyme schemes, most often the quatrain or the sonnet. (For Longfellow, the sonnet
was the quintessential high literary form.) The music, though sonorous, supports the sense rather than calls attention to itself. It
is what Donald Davie might call a "chaste" style. The two types of lyric are more easily differentiated on style than subject.
Longfellow dealt with serious themes in both modes, although when he wrote about overtly literary topics ("Chaucer," "Milton,"
"Divina Commedia") he invariably used his high style.
To illustrate the difference between Longfellow's popular and high styles, here are representative passages from two of his bestknown poems, "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" (the popular style) and "Shakespeare" (the literary style):
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, and the curfew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
A vision as of crowded city streets,
With human life in endless overflow;
Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets that blow
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To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats,
Of sailors landed from their anchored fleets;
Tolling of bells in turrets, and below
Voices of children, and bright flowers that throw
O'er garden walls their intermingled sweets!
In nineteenth-century lyric poetry the chief difference between the high style and the popular style was density of effect. Popular
poetry strived toward a transparent texture in which local effects were subordinated to predictable general patterns of syntax and
prosody. Literary poetry compressed the effects of meter, diction, metaphor, and image to achieve a richer texture; the reader
was trusted to discern the general formal patterns of sound and sense through the many changes in local textural density. These
two passages display different levels of poetic effect. The popular poem allows the metrical form to determine the syntax. The
literary poem revels in counterpointing the two elements; it uses line breaks to syncopate the rhythm. "The Tide Rises, the Tide
Falls" neatly balances its images, placing two images or details in each line. "Shakespeare" lets the images stretch or contract
irregularly; there is no set syntactic pattern framing the images. The popular poem ends each stanza with a set refrain to keep the
image and the mood easily focused. "Shakespeare" tumbles forward unpredictably. The images in the popular poem usually
move forward sequentially or cyclically and rarely show dialectical opposition. The images in the literary poem are more exact,
unusual, and dynamic; one never knows exactly where each new image will lead.
The two styles do not represent different stages in Longfellow's careeras they did, for example, in Yeats's case. Though the high
style emerged slightly later (one first sees it fully developed in The Belfrey of Bruges in 1845), the two styles essentially coexist
through all of Longfellow's mature poetry. The poet saw both as valid literary modes. One aimed at the general audience, the
other at the intelligentsia. A contemporary reader must, however, remember that in the nineteenth century the two modes were
not seen in opposition; there was not yet a gulf between highbrow and lowbrow art. (It is surely not coincidental that the terms
highbrow and lowbrow enter English in the second decade of the twentieth centuryjust as Modernism arrived in full force.)
Longfellow's high style was simply a refinement of his popular mode, and the mass audience for popular poetry included the
literary intelligentsia as well as common readers.
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The temptation for modern critics, however, has been to assume that Longfellow's high style is naturally superior to his popular
mode. His best lyric poems in the high style fit easily into contemporary notions of how genuine poetry operates. The few
distinguished examples of critical analysis of specific poemslike James M. Cox's "Longfellow and His Cross of Snow"virtually
always focus on poems in the literary mode. Likewise, the handful of poems that survive in academic anthologies like "Mezzo
Cammin" and "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (the latter surely one of the great American poems of its century), are almost
inevitably products of the high style. Moreover, the fact that most of Longfellow's weakest poems are written in the popular
style reinforces the scholarly prejudice toward the high style.
Although it is easier to discuss poems in the high style, since their denser verbal texture invites analysis, there is ultimately no
cogent reason why Longfellow's literary poems should be categorically preferred to the best popular ones. Why should one
consider "My Lost Youth" inferior to "Chaucer" because the latter has more stylistic complexity? An adequate theory of poetry
leaves room to admire both. Both modes are artistically legitimate, since the test of poetry is its ability to involve and move the
reader to enlightenment, consolation, or delightnot its susceptibility to critical analysis. Perhaps the real reason why the popular
style appears an inferior literary medium is that its aesthetic requirementsclarity, simplicity, emotional directness, syntactic
linearity, and prosodic symmetrymake it harder to write well. There is less freedom of style and subject than the high literary
mode affords, and the poet faces the significant challenge of having to surprise the reader in only predictable ways. In such a
transparent style every flaw and banality shows. Time is especially cruel to popular poetry; each subsequent change of attitude
mercilessly exposes new imperfections.
There have probably been fewer than a dozen English-language poets who have managed to create a significant and enduring
body of poetry in a popular style: Herrick, Burns, Blake, Whittier, Housman, Kipling, Stevenson, Langston Hughes, and a few
others. To this select, if mostly unfashionable, company, one must add Longfellow. His many failuresand they are legion in so
prolific a poetmust not blind the critic to his remarkable successes. His special gift was to bring an intense musicality and
powerful atmosphere to the light texture of the
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popular lyric, which one sees in his best work, "My Lost Youth," "The Fire of Drift-Wood," "Snow-Flakes," "The Tide Rises,
The Tide Falls," "The Ropewalk,'' and "Aftermath." There is even much to admire in his sentimental idylls, "The Day is Done"
and "The Children's Hour," which survive a century of critical opprobrium with surprising freshness. The frank emotionalism of
such poems leaves modern readers uneasy who forget the fragility of domestic happiness in an age of high infant mortality and
low life expectancy. American life expectency has doubled since Longfellow's time from approximately thirty-nine years in
1850 to seventy-five years in 1988. Medical progress has been as important as cultural trends in changing literary sensibility.
(Look at how rapidly AIDS has revived a Victorian emotionalism in verse and drama.) "The Children's Hour," a poem admired
by both Auden and Fiedler, was written by a man who had already watched a wife and young daughter die and would soon see
his second wife suffer an excruciating death. When a literary culture loses its ability to recognize and appreciate genuine poems
like "My Lost Youth" because they are too simple, it has surely traded too much of its innocence and openness for a shallow
sophistication.
The issue of Longfellow's status as a major poet ultimately rests on the critical assessment of his four booklength
poemsEvangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of
a Wayside Inn (18631873). These were the poems that earned him a preeminent position among his contemporaries, they were
also the works most utterly rejected by Modernism. The long poems present a number of problems for critics, not the least of
which is their proper evaluation. They are the slipperiest kind of literature to judge: they are not quite masterpieces but too good
and too original to go awaylike Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. They still command
a reader's attention and linger in the memory. The poems are also troublesome for critics to discuss in a contemporary context
because they bear so little relation to the subsequent tradition of longer American poems. Whereas "Song of Myself" is
illuminated by the tradition it engendered, Longfellow's extended poems have little connection to twentieth-century work, not
even, except tangentially, the booklength poems of Robinson and Frost. Longfellow's poems relate to earlier, mainly European
traditions.
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Most American long poems have been epics of self-discovery, works that consciously set out to explore and define both national
and personal identities. Hence the author's autobiography eventually figures directly or indirectly in the quest. Whatever their
other differences, The Bridge, The Cantos, Paterson, A, Maximus Poems, Dream Songs, Gunslinger, The Changing Light at
Sandover, History, and The One Day all share the investigative dynamic of mixing personal and public mythologies. The
Modernist culture epic has also been a notoriously messy genresprawling, discontinuous, idiosyncratic, and obscure. While each
long poem has its champions, none except Whitman's, their common matrix, has been widely regarded as a success. By
comparison, Longfellow's extended poems are distressingly neat and lucid: they are polished, linear, nonautobiographical
narratives. Their form is not exploratory but patterned after traditional genrespastoral romance, folk epic, and framed tales. They
are neither aimed at literary intellectuals norwith the notable exception of Hiawathaobsessed with defining national or personal
identity. They are conceived as serious but popular entertainments, stories meant to enlarge the reader's humanity without
deconstructing his or her moral universe.
The moral element in Longfellow's extended poems cannot be minimized. Although the poems may now seem old-fashioned in
form, they remain surprisingly contemporary in their concerns. Evangeline depicts the personal tragedies of a displaced ethnic
and religious minority driven from its homeland by an imperial power. The Song of Hiawatha, whatever its scholarly failings,
tries to present with dignity the legends and customs of Native Americans on their own terms. The Courtship of Miles Standish,
the least interesting of the poems, critiques the harshness and brutality of military values. Tales of a Wayside Inn, whose very
framework celebrates multiculturalism, contains stories openly concerned with environmental sensitivity, religious tolerance,
political freedom, and charity. Not the least of Longfellow's influences on American culture has been political. He helped
articulate the New England liberal consciousness that eventually became mainstream American public opinion. If contemporary
critics are quick to point out the internal contradictions of this ideology, it still represented the most enlightened viewpoint of its
era.
There is no room here for even a minimal exploration of the poems but only a few general observations. Evangeline is the most
poetically
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impressive of the longer poems, lt contains passagesthe prologue, the burning of Grand-Pré, the journey on the Mississippi, the
description of the prairiesthat are both breathtakingly beautiful and, as Longinus understood the term, sublime. The story also
has a magnificent narrative sweep until the end, which reveals Longfellow's central weakness as a storyteller, his sentimentality.
He lacked the tragic insight necessary to carry a painful story to its inevitable conclusion; he can only resolve it in comforting
terms. That Evangeline's ending was, in fact, historically true does not redeem the sweet sentimentality with which the poet
saturates its Finale. And yet, as John Seelye has pointed out, "Evangeline does haunt us, a vague ghost adrift on the Mississippi
in company with Uncle Tom and Huck Finn, those other refugee symbols of exile and disarray."
The Song of Hiawatha is probably the closest thing America will ever have to that European Romantic obsession, the national
folk epic. This startlingly original poem was the work that made Longfellow the preeminently popular poet in English. It sold
thirty thousand copies in its first six months in print and eventually became the most popular long American poem ever written,
both at home and abroad. Hiawatha is also the extended poem that best displays Longfellow's two greatest gifts as a
storytellermythmaking and narrative thrust. Like other great popular narrative artists Longfellow excelled at mythos more than
logos. He could create or adapt characters that seemed to exist outside their stories. While one cannot imagine Lambert Strether
outside of the particular verbal universe of The Ambassadors, one can easily envision Simon Legree, Count Dracula, Ebeneezer
Scrooge, and Hiawatha in another medium. Hiawatha created a series of archetypes (some would say stereotypes) of Native
American culture that have permeated the popular imagination. The most readable long narrative poem of the nineteenth
century, it also displays those virtues Matthew Arnold celebrated most highly in Homer, "the rapidity of its movement, and the
plainness and directness of its style." That Arnold's terms of praise sound odd to contemporary ears is one more sign of how
remote our literary culture has grown from narrative poetry.
Although The Song of Hiawatha has received more interesting scholarly and critical attention than any other Longfellow poem,
most of the analyses have been historical, biographical, anthropological, or ideological (political denunciations of Hiawatha have
recently been the one
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active area of Longfellow criticism.) Consequently, the poem's specifically literary characteristics remain only half-understood.
Posterity has essentially made two mutually contradictory criticisms of Hiawatha: first, as a narrative, its style is insufficiently
naturalistic, too little, that is, like a realist novel; second, Longfellow departs too much from his mythic material and
unconsciously Europeanizes his Native Americans. There is a great deal of truth in both charges, and yet they seem to miss the
sheer originality of the poem, in which Longfellow tries to invent a medium in English to register the irreconcilably alien
cultural material he presents. The stylistic objections to Hiawatha, therefore, are largely based on misconceptions of
Longfellow's intentions. The most frequent criticism is of the poem's meter, the trochaic tetrameter line he borrowed from the
Finnish Kalevala, which has seemed too artificial and formulaic to some readers. The chief advantage of this measure, however,
is that it isn't naturalistic. It was an overt distancing device, as was the incorporation of dozens of Ojibway words. These devices
continuously remind the listener that Hiawatha's mythic universe is not our world. There are many other devices of syntax,
lineation, diction, and rhetoric that give the poem its distinctive style. Although more often ridiculed than understood, the style
of Hiawatha is in its own way as original as that of Pound's Cantos.
The fatal flaw of Hiawatha is, once again, the endingjustly notorious among scholars of Native American literaturein which
Hiawatha instructs his people to accept the Black-Robes and then, like Tennyson's Ulysses, sails (or rather paddles) into the
sunset. Longfellow lacked the tragic vision to recognize that there could be no humane, liberal reconciliation between Native
Americans and invading Europeans. The nineteenth-century poem that Hiawatha most resembles (but is never compared to) is
Richard Wagner's libretto for Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner also recast a disparate group of pre-Christian myths into an
integrated narrative, but he understood that there can be no bloodless transition from one civilization to another: a hero and a
people who do not triumph are utterly destroyed. Once Hiawatha's narrative leaves mythic time for history it must face the
tragic consequences of its material, but tragedy was a genre beyond Longfellow's reachperhaps even beyond the melioristic
vision of Unitarian liberalism. The first twenty cantos of Hiawatha achieve an oddly epic grandeur, the last two dissipate in
utopian social fantasy.
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Tales of a Wayside Inn makes the most convincing case for Longfellow's narrative mastery. Here, rather than tackling an epic
structure, he worked in his most congenial medium, the short tale. As Newton Arvin rightly says, "No literary undertaking could
have made a happier or more fruitful use of his powers . . . his storytelling genius, his sense of narrative form, his versatility,
and the opulence of his literary erudition." Roughly modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron, Longfellow's poem consists of a
series of verse tales told by a sundry group of travelers over three days at the Red Horse Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. The
storytellers form a diverse groupa Sicilian political refugee, a Spanish Jew, a Norwegian musician, a youthful student, a broadminded theologian, a tender-hearted poet, the Yankee landlordand their stories draw from all of their ethnic traditions. The
narrative framework is a bit rickety, but the stories themselves, which are told in an astonishing variety of metrical forms, are,
despite a few weak ones, generally splendid. The best half dozen or so tales"Paul Revere's Ride," "King Robert of Sicily," "The
Cobbler of Hagenau," ''Azrael," "The Monk of Casal-Maggiore," "The Legend Beautiful," and especially "The Birds of
Killingworth"rank among the best short American narrative poems ever written. Tales of a Wayside Inn is Longfellow at his
most endearingly human. One senses here as in none of the other long poems his famous personal charm, warmth, and humor.
When Howard Nemerov prepared a selected edition of Longfellow's poems in 1959, he ignored all of the other long poems to
include nine selections from Tales of a Wayside Inn. Posterity may prove his strong preferences correct.
It is impossible to understand Longfellow as a poet without studying the translations that make up nearly half of his nondramatic
verse. He was the first great poet-translator in American literature. In this respect, as in his cultural internationalism, he
exercised a major, if unacknowledged, influence on twentieth-century poetry. By demonstrating how translation could nourish a
poet's growth, he introduced a powerful imaginative dynamic into our tradition. Translation became a means for American poets
both to perfect their craft and to assimilate the literature of other cultures. Longfellow also showed how translation allowed the
American poet to demonstrate mastery over the European tradition and implicitly claim equal status to classic authorsa concept
central both to Pound and Eliot and their descendants. Longfellow's commitment to translation was the practical extension of his
assent to
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the ideologies of internationalism and Weltliteratur. He stands, therefore, at the beginning of the innovative tradition of verse
translation that enlarged the possibilities of American poetry. Directly or indirectly, he is the prototype not only of Pound and
Eliot but ultimately of writers as dissimilar as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Robert Fitzgerald, W. S.
Merwin, William Jay Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, John F. Nims, David Slavitt, and Robert Bly.
Longfellow also helped free translation from the monopoly of Greek and Latin classics that had earlier formed the bulk of
serious verse translation in English. His huge body of translation consists almost entirely of poems taken from modern
languages, including work by contemporary authors like Tegner and von Platen. If Longfellow helped establish a new group of
"modern" masters in English such as Michaelangelo, Goethe, Gongora, Lope de Vega, and, most important, Dante, he also dared
to translate minor poetssimply because their work interested or delighted him. When critics belittle Longfellow for bothering
with forgotten poets like Stockman, Mahlmann, Coran, and Ducis, they forget how much easier it is to experiment with new
verse forms and genres when working with congenial but unchallenging texts. Surely the reason that Longfellow made such an
accomplished debut as a narrative poet in Ballads and Other Poems was his assimilation of the Northern European verse
storytelling tradition through translating Uhland, Evald, Tegner, and various folk ballads. Likewise, his unprecedented mastery
of versification grew from his attempts to recreate foreign meters in English. If some new measure worked in a translation (such
as Tegner's dactylic hexameter), Longfellow would employ it for an original poema method of imaginative assimilation his
grand nephew Pound seems to have inherited.
With some notable exceptions, however, Longfellow's translations remain more important for their influence than their abiding
literary worth. He was not the equal of Dryden, Pope, or Rossetti. His theory of translation, which stressed "rendering literally
the words of a foreign author" while at the same time preserving "the spirit of the original," placed restrictions on him not
usually assumed by the greatest masters of verse translation. As Arvin observed, Longfellow's ideal for translation "was not
paraphrase, and decidedly not 'imitation,' but what Dryden called 'metaphrase.' "Indeed Longfellow practiced a halfscholarly/half-poetic method of translation that attempts to bring over the
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original text as poetry into English with meticulous attention to its literal sense, diction, lineation, and precise versification. This
formidable agenda placed enormous burdens on his poetic skill, but the results were frequently not only impressive but
fascinatingly original. His translations of Virgil's First Eclogue done in fluent hexameter and Ovid's Tristia (III, x) in elegiac
couplets remain remarkable. The challenge of recreating classical meters in English has obsessed poets for centuries, but no one
ever managed to bring over the elegant rhythm of the Latin elegiac couplet more naturally than Longfellow:
Should anyone there in Rome remember Ovid the exile,
And, without me, my name still in the city survive;
Tell him that under stars which never set in the ocean
I am existing still, here in a barbarous land.
His best translations are astonishingly faithful to both the meaning and the music of the original. His versions of Goethe's
intricately rhymed "Wanderer's Night-Songs," for example, show an uncanny fidelity to nearly every aspect of the German. But
it was not merely technical skill that animated Longfellow's translations. He excelled at the form for the same reason he did at
narrative; he possessed the "negative capability" of extinguishing his own personality in the authors he translated. He could
recreate a poem in English while maintaining the strangeness of its beauty, as in this translation of Michelangelo's "Dante":
What should be said of him cannot be said;
By too great splendor is his name attended;
To blame is easier those who him offended,
Than reach the faintest glory round him shed.
This man descended to the doomed and dead
For our instruction; then to God ascended;
Heaven opened wide to him its portals splendid,
Who from his country's, closed against him, fled.
Ungrateful land! To its own prejudice
Nurse of his fortunes; and this showeth well,
That the most perfect most of grief shall see.
Among a thousand proofs let one suffice,
That as he exile hath no parallel,
Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.
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Longfellow's greatest accomplishment as a translator was his version of The Divine Comedy (original edition, 1867; revised text,
1870), which reflected forty years of deep involvement with the poem. Dante's position in the English-speaking world was
relatively marginal until the Romantic movement, when Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron fell under his influence. The first
complete English translation of The Divine Comedy, Henry Cary's version, did not appear until 1814, almost five centuries after
the original. Longfellow's advocacy of the poem as teacher, translator, and commentator was crucial in establishing its canonic
stature in America. Not the least important part of his support was putting Dante into the center of Harvard literary studies,
where, through his successors, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Grandgent, and George Santayana, it
exercised a decisive early influence on young poets like Eliot, Stevens, and cummings. Longfellow's splendidly exact and richly
annotated version remained the finest verse translation for nearly three generations, until it was superseded by the Laurence
Binyon and John Ciardi versions.
If translation was an essential aspect of Longfellow's vision of the new American poet whose professionalism allowed him to
participate in Weltliteratur, so was his dedication to prosody. Longfellow was the most versatile master of versification in
American literature. His range and originality in metrics remains unprecedented. Virtually all major American poets have
worked primarily in iambic, syllabic, or free verseexcept Longfellow, that is, who not only used almost every traditional meter
known to English but also experimented with new measures, some foreign, others original to him. He explored stress meter and
mixed meters, and, as Arvin observes, his accentual poems like "The Cumberland" prefigure Hopkins's sprung rhythm.
Longfellow, like George Herbert, also habitually played with stanza shapes, inventing several new forms. Sometimes he set
poems of direct and simple emotion in complex and subtle stanza forms that gave them unexpected resonance, as in the intricate
stanza he invented for "My Lost Youth" with its shifting line lengths and unrhymed refrain. Another of Longfellow's
uncelebrated contributions to English prosody was his experimentation with the unrhymed lyric, as in "The Bells of Lynn." He
also explored free verse before Whitman, as in "Tegner's Drapa" (1850) and The Golden Legend (1851). Longfellow's vers libre
is partic-
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ularly noteworthy because it eschews the Biblical prose rhythms that characterized most free verse before the fin de siècle. Here
are two short passages, the first from "Tegner's Drapa," the second from the later Christus (1872):
So perish the old Gods!
But out of the sea of Time
Rises a new land of song
Fairer than the old.
Over the meadows green
Walk the young bards and sing.
I am the voice of one
Crying in the wilderness alone:
Prepare ye the way of the Lord;
Make his paths straight
In the land that is desolate!
The diction is standard for Longfellow's age, and the second passagelike much early vers libreis rhymed, but the rhythms and
lineation would not be out of place in Pound's Ripostes half a century later. The line lengths are irregular and follow the
phrasing rather than any metrical measure. The rhythm is usually rising, but Longfellow consciously disrupts the underlying
iambic movement to create a looser cadence. The prosody prefigures early Modernist practices and is as innovative as anything
in Leaves of Grass.
Today prosody is a neglected subject. Few literary critics know more than the rudiments of metrics, and, in the aftermath of the
free-verse revolution, even many poets have never studied versification. The last century, however, considered prosody an
essential part of literary education. Critics debated issues of versification with the vehemence our contemporaries bring to
literary theory. Prosody, in fact, played an important role in Victorian literary theory. Anyone who studies the early reviews of
Longfellow's books notices how much space critics devoted to discussing issues of versification. His experimentation with
foreign meters, like dactylic hexameter in Evangeline or unrhymed trochaic tetrameter in The Song of Hiawatha, were hotly
debated. One of his major accomplishments in the eyes of Victorian cognoscenti was his success in making classical hexameter
work in English, something no other poet had ever been able to do with equal aplomb. (Even Matthew
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Arnold reluctantly admired Longfellow's success with hexameter.) Surely one reason for the drop in Longfellow's reputation has
been the decline of interest among both scholars and poets in formal prosody.
The early twentieth century saw two shifts in critical attitudes toward prosody, both of which prejudiced assessments of
Longfellow and his fellow Fireside poets. The first was the rise of free verse. As free verse becamethrough a series of
misconceptions, Timothy Steele has recently arguedinextricably associated with American Modernist poetry, critics revised the
nineteenth-century canon to highlight poets like Whitman, who prefigured the development, or Dickinson, who ignored many
prosodic conventions. As "open form" became a mainstream concept after the Beats, it mixed with nativist sentiments to declare
free verse the only true American measure and condemn formal verse as a reactionary British import. This ideology dismissed
Longfellow, Whittier, and their contemporaries en bloc. (Whitman's supporters have often displayed a special animus toward
Longfellow, since he enjoyed a huge popularity among common readers their more obstreperously democratic poet has never
approached.) But the celebration of free verse would not have been so damaging had it not combined with a second shift in
attitude among the surviving defenders of formal poetrya shift that has gone undiscussed in critical literature.
Twentieth-century American poetry has gradually developed a metrical puritanism, a conviction among both poets and critics
that serious formal poetry is best written (to borrow Frost's dictum) only in regular or loose iambics. Triple and trochaic meters
have gradually been relegated to light verse, classical and foreign meters regarded as technical curiosities. This metrical
puritanism developed as second-generation Modernists, many of whom like Yvor Winters and Allen Tate were associated with
New Criticism, tried to reconcile formal metrics with Modernism. In the process of defending traditional meter against free verse
they felt it necessary to separate the meters suitable for high art from the catchy measures of popular poetry. The tightness and
subtlety of iambic meters were preferred to the intrusive and looser rhythms of triple meter or the hypnotic but inflexible
trochaic measures. Consequently, whereas Longfellow or Whittier, Tennyson or Browning comfortably moved between iambic
and other meters, one rarely, if ever, sees a poem in triple measure or trochees by Winters, Tate, Hart Crane, J. V. Cunningham,
Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht,
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or other twentieth-century American formalists. These poets looked at the overtly musical meters favored by Whittier,
Longfellow, and Poe either as vulgar concessions to popular taste or artistic misjudgments. When the free-verse prejudice
against metrical poetry combined with a high art bias against noniambic verse (in an environment that downgraded all narrative
poetry and popular art), who was left to defend such gems as Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" or Whittier's "Maud Muller"
and "Barbara Frietchie"? (Pound anthologized "Barbara Frietchie" in Confucius to Cummingswhat poet today would be bold
enough to do so?) Even Matthiessen, who anthologized Longfellow's narrative poems, preferred the respectable iambic ones like
''The Birds of Killingworth" and "The Monk of Casal-Maggiore." If modern criticism has created a distorted version of
nineteenth-century American poetry by dismissing narrative verse and popular poetry, it has produced an equally impoverished
account of the era's lyric poetry by rejecting most noniambic verse. Metrical diversity was one of the chief glories of midnineteenth-century poetry. By privileging iambic verse, critics not only miss some of the era's greatest poems but also obscure
the commitment to popular poetry shared by most of the period's best poets.
"I am a man of fortune greeting heirs," Wallace Stevens once wrote. He might have been predicting his present place in
American letters. His work generated a poetic and critical tradition that sustains his central place in the canon. Longfellow's
heritage, by contrast, has few claimants. His small body of lyric poems writtten in the high style has secured him a niche in the
contemporary canon, but the traditions he most richly endowednarrative and popular poetrywere devalued by Modernism, and
his contributions to translation and scholarship have been eroded by time. His direct influence on our poetry ended with Frost,
though his cultural vision of internationalism continues indirectly to shape our national literary identity. Now that Modernism
itself has become a historical period along with the Genteel Tradition it helped displace, a comprehensive reassessment of our
poetic canon is necessary. The task is not to reject Modernism, which was our poetry's greatest period, but to correct the
blindspots and biases of its critical assumptions. A reevaluation of Longfellow will be an important part of this enterprise. How
will his work be revalued in the aftermath of Modernism? If he will never regain his dominant position in nineteenth-cen-
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tury American poetry, he will surely reemerge as a larger and more complex figure than he has recently seemed. The continuing
popularity of his workdespite nearly a century of critical scornproves that it still has a vitality that current critical instruments are
not designed to register. "Some books are undeservedly forgotten," W. H. Auden once wrote, "none are undeservedly
remembered." Longfellow's vast influence on American culture paradoxically makes him both central and invisible; to reevaluate
his work properly will not only require capable literary critics but unprejudiced cultural critics. He can be ignored only at the
cost of misreading his century. His place in American literature brings to mind Basil Bunting's poem, "On a Fly-leaf of Pound's
Cantos'':
These are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux at leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!
This tribute to Longfellow's grandnephew applies as easily to him. If Longfellow's ultimate place in American poetry is still
uncertain, one thing is surehis best work will remain a permanent part of our literature. You will have to go a long way round if
you want to ignore him.
Dana Gioia
Further Reading
Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Art. Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1963.
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. 3 vols. Tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Selected Poems. Ed. Lawrence Buell. New York: Penguin, 1988.
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The American Transcendentalist Poets
The practice of poetry was both tangential and central to American Transcendentalism. Tangential, in that Transcendentalism
was a multiform movement, religiocentric at its core and inspired by the participants' excitement at the prospect of individual
and social transformation owing to the divinity they saw inherent in or directly accessible to human nature. All but a few held
the composition of verses ancillary to this goal of human transformation. Yet as late Romantics and as well-bred post-Puritan
provincials thoroughly socialized into appreciation of the chaster forms of high culture, the Transcendentalists held poetry in far
higher reverence than late twentieth-century culture does, prizing it as the loftiest form of artistic expression. The Hebrew
prophets, the bardic and priestly poet-prophecy of other nations, Milton and Wordsworth and contemporary criticismall these
had taught the Transcendentalists to think of poetry as, in principle, the most fitting vehicle for the logos among all the literary
genres. The fact that poetry had since the beginnings of the colonial period been the one and only fictive genre considered
morally sound reinforced the Transcendentalists' esteem for it, as did their personal fondness for reading and writing. For they
were by temperament an unusually bookish lot. Most of the men were trained to be ministers; a number of both sexes were
teachers.
In short, the Transcendentalists were people of the word: eager consumers of texts and producers of discourse. For such
peoplefrom such a class and region at such a point in American historyto admire poetry and seek to write it were almost second
nature.
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The poetry they produced, however, has provoked nagging questions of major import. To begin: Why wasn't it better than it
was? Today, Americanists credit Emerson with having ushered in an epoch in which American writing reached a standard
worthy of international comparison and attained a distinctive voice of its own. Earlier coteries can be identified, such as the
Connecticut Wits and the New York Knickerbockers; but the legacies of Emerson and Thoreau were much more important for
the future of American letters. Yet the case for influence seems more impressive with respect to Transcendentalist thought and
prose style than with respect to the movement's poetry. Transcendentalism's poetry has often seemed tame and thin by
comparison to its prose: an art of cautiously bound forms, formal diction, traditional metrics that at times seem bizarrely at odds
with the theory of Self-Reliance, as in Jones Very's addiction to the sonnet as the preferred vehicle for expressing the
untrammeled power of the Holy Spirit. Given the Transcendentalists' admiration for poetry, why didn't they produce better
results? Or was it precisely the "burden of the past," as Walter Jackson Bate conceives it, or "the anxiety of influence" in Harold
Blooms formulation, that constricted the Transcendentalists: that caused them to write more freely in essayistic prose, a form
already long "naturalized" into New England culture (by reason of the sermon tradition, for example), and without the imposing
cultural authority and intricate conventions of poetry, whose giants and critical interpreters were firmly associated with the old
world rather than with the new. The prospect of writing a GREAT poem in America may have seemed as constipating to the
New England Transcendentalists as the project of GREAT painting came to seem to their fellow Bostonian Washington Allston.
Perhaps, then, it is to be expected that the Transcendentalists would have exalted poetry but succeeded at prose, that a more
vigorous poetic voice would have taken another generation or so to emerge. Perhaps their true poetry was in their prose and their
poetic strivings in the nominal sense can be discounted, without prejudice, as an obsolescent obligatory mannerism of a culture
in the process of tranformation.
But perhaps this is to write off Transcendentalist verse too gliblyboth the seriousness and the quality of that effort. Possibly we
have missed something, judged their poetry by the wrong criteria? The continuity between Emerson's poetry and that of
Dickinson, who seems to
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have read Emerson's verse with at least a degree of interest (to the point that one of her few published poems was mistaken for
his work) suggests, for example, that a cavalier attitude toward the poetry of Transcendentalism is precipitous. If Dickinson
could have found something useful here, if Robert Frost was serious when he praised Emerson's "Uriel" as the "best western
poem yet," if the dean of Indo-Anglian poets, Nissim Ezekiel, is sincere in his professed respect for Emerson's poetry, then
perhaps we should take the poems of at least Emerson seriously. Indeed, one may dare to go a good deal further than this. But
before any sort of case can be made for their work, we need first to recall who the Transcendentalist poets were.
On the strength of the quality and influence of his two published volumesPoems (1845) and May-Day and Other Pieces
(1867)Ralph Waldo Emerson (180382) must certainly be reckoned Transcendentalism's leading poet. Emerson authored a good
half of the titles that would appear on most readers' short lists of the strongest poems of the movement. But Emerson was less
committed to the medium of verse than three younger figures whose work he supported and helped to publish. William Ellery
Channing the younger (18171901), who composed a half-dozen uneven volumes (assembled in Walter Harding's 1967 edition of
his Collected Poems), was thought by the other Concord Transcendentalists, if not by the movement at large, to be the group's
most dedicated poet. Channing was the only Transcendentalist poet whose style truly evolvedfrom shorter lyrics to longer
narrative and dramatic poems. But he was a poet of striking passages rather than of whole poems. Christopher Pearse Cranch
(181392), better known for his cartoon of Emerson's transparent eyeball, was a painter and poet of lesser seriousness but greater
consistency than Channing who published three volumes that include several of Transcendentalism's most articulate lyics: Poems
(1844), The Bird and the Bell (1875), and Ariel and Caliban (1887). More narrowly but more profoundly gifted than either, at
least in the earlier years of his career, was Jones Very (181380), who specialized in visionary religious sonnets that came closer
than the work of any of his other Transcendentalist colleagues to realizing the ideal of poetry as inspiration. Very's works
remained largely unpublished during his life, except for a small selection of Essays and Poems collected by Emerson (1839).
James Freeman Clarke's edition of Very's Poems and
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Essays (1886) and William Irving Bartlett's publication of additional Very manuscript poems in Emerson's "Brave Saint" (1942)
rounded out his canon.
Like Very, but in a far more secularized mold, Henry Thoreau (181762) started his career as an aspiring poet, versifying
extensively in his twenties and undertaking the most ambitious program of reading in classical and English poets of any
Transcendentalist, until after the Walden experience he turned almost exclusively to prose. His Collected Poems were edited in
1943 by Carl Bode. By contrast, Bronson Alcott (17991888) blossomed as a poet in old age, producing two slim volumes: New
Connecticut (1881), a reminiscence of boyhood, and Sonnets and Canzonets (1882). Other Transcendentalists who wrote goodly
amounts of poetry included Margaret Fuller (181050), Ellen Hooper (181248), her sister Caroline Sturgis Tappan (181888), and
the Transcendentalist ministers William H. Furness, Charles T. Brooks, Theodore Parker, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel
Longfellow. Fuller and Hooper were the most gifted among these. Fuller's poetry was represented in her Papers on Literature
and Art (1846); Hooper's collected poetry was printed in an unpublished edition of "Poems" (n.d.), the one known copy of which
is owned by the Boston Public Library.
Of the several dozen strongest poems that stand out amid this body of perhaps three thousandmostly short lyrics and never more
than a hundred lines or soa good half are by Emerson; works by Thoreau, Very, Cranch, and Channing make up the bulk of the
rest. An additional several dozen poems contain striking passages of some length. In the discussion that follows, I have managed
to make at least brief reference to many, though hardly all, of my own favorites, quoting them in part or whole. Many of the rest
can be found in two judicious anthologies edited by Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (1950) and The American
Transcendentalists (1957).
To identify the Transcendentalist poets and state one's preferences are easy tasks. Simply call the roll of people associated with
the movement who wrote poems, then talk about the texts that interest you. To define the internal coherence of the field is much
harder, at least once one tries to move from doctrine to form; for the stylistic peculiarites of the poetry written by the
Transcendentalists are less idiosyncratic than those of Whitman, Dickinson, or most of the major British Romantic poets. Often
Transcendentalist poems seem to recycle eminent precur-
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sors: George Herbert (Emerson's "Grace"), John Milton (Emerson's "Woodnotes," the title allusion to Shakespeare taken from
"L'Allegro"), Wordsworth (Channing's The Wanderer), Shelley (Cranch's Satan). The chief strands of stylistic influence were
Romanticism and the Renaissance, with secondary infusions from Neoclassic, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and archaic European
models (bardic poetry and sagas). Since most Transcendentalists wrote poetry with the left hand, as it were, and since on
principle they prized ideas and experience more highly than form, it is not surprising that their poetry was a heterogeneous
assemblage of more or less traditional short lyric and mid-length narrative genres. As we look more closely, however, patterns
begin to emerge.
The most fundamental of these is a persistent striving for the arresting compressed statement.
Thy beauty fades, and with it too my love
(Very)
Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself
(Thoreau)
The issues of the general soul
Are mirrored in its round abode
(Channing)
The passive master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned
(Emerson, couplet from "The Problem"
inscribed on his gravestone)
the white phantom of an ancient maid
Doing its shopping on a pistareen
Or the lame parson's sulky, time-worn trap,
Sahara's sermon creaking in the wheel
(Channing)
I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty
I woke, and found that life was duty
(Hooper)
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Sweet is the pleasure
Itself cannot spoil!
Is not true leisure
One with true toil?
(John Sullivan Dwight)
Guard thee from the powers of evil;
Who cannot trust, vows to the devil.
Walk thy slow and spell-bound way;
Keep on thy mask, or shun the day
Let go my hand upon the way.
(Margaret Fuller)
Heart to heart was never known;
Mind with mind did never meet;
We are columns left alone
Of a temple once complete.
(Cranch)
I hear not with the ear,the heart doth tell
Its secret deeds to me untold before
(Very)
Virtue palters; Right is hence;
Freedom praised, but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid.
(Emerson)
When thou approachest to the One,
Self from thyself thou first must free,
Thy cloak duplicity cast clean aside,
And in thy Being's being be.
(Alcott)
This kind of thing easily becomes facile (Dwight) or overstrained (Alcott). But when it works, the poem administers an
electrical jolt. The jolt can serve many purposes: prophetic rage (Very), satirical stiletto-dig (Channing), visionary enthusiasm
(the Emerson couplet), elegiac wistfulness (Cranch). Transcendentalist poems often strike one as a kind of bardic or homiletic
wisdom literature.
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The Transcendentalists' taste for the aphoristic moment was whetted by their reading interests: in biblical proverb, Latin
epigram, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon laconics, Metaphysical emblem poetry, and the closed couplet of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury verse, perhaps especially the related genres of epithet, epitaph, and inscription. Such models appealed to them for
reasons of principle as well as taste. They believed that the peaks, the quintessences, of experience count for more than temporal
sequence. Furthermore, as amateur metaphysicians reading the book of nature from a loosely pantheistic standpoint, they sought
to find the universe in the grain of sand: to push through to the ultimate truth-statement about an image or event.
Epigrammaticism registers all this insofar as it seems to stand for a perfect encapsulated conceptual distillation of the object.
The epigram's impersonality also appealed to the Transcendentalists. Epigram converts the mood of the moment into prophetic
truth, converts subjective voice into oracle. This depersonalization reflects the Emersonian conviction, shared by most of the
circle, that what justifies the self is its universality. Finally, the epigrammatic series, or the longer poem comprised of striking
discrete epithets or propositional statements or allegorized images, reflects the Emersonian corollary that truth never stands still
but must be stabbed, thrust, or jabbed at perpetually. "The quality of the imagination," as he put it, "is to flow, and not to
freeze."
What I have called the impersonality of Transcendentalist poetic utterance requires special attention here, given the importance
to the movement of the underlying principle (self beomes Self to the extent that it is universal rather than personal), but more
particularly its wide importance as a problematic that helps to define the structure and voice of the poems to issue from the
movement. A number of the strong Transcendentalist poems are about the problem of rehabilitating the self (with a small s) by
converting it into Self so as to achieve the state of impersonality of which the poem's speaker sometimes serves as model,
sometimes as antimodel. Let us look at two examples.
'Tis to yourself I speak; you cannot know
Him whom I call in speaking such an one,
For thou beneath the earth liest buried low,
Which he alone as living walks upon;
Thou mayst at times have heard him speak to you,
And often wished perchance that you were he;
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And I must ever wish that it were true,
For then thou couldst hold fellowship with me;
But now thou hear'st us talk as strangers, met
Above the room wherein thou liest abed;
A word perhaps loud spoken thou mayst get,
Or hear our feet when heavily they tread;
But he who speaks, or him who's spoken to,
Must both remain as strangers still to you.
(Very, "Yourself")
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
(Emerson, "Brahma")
In both poems, an enlightened being speaks prescriptively but enigmatically to one lying in the darkness of alienation from his
more authentic self, a self implicitly conceived as spirit or essence. The riddlesomeness befits the listener's benighted condition,
perhaps. The rhetorical strategy in each case is to try to tease or shock the reader into enlightenment: Emerson by the argument
that Brahma the world-soul is omnipresent, but inaccessible to the "meek lover of the good" who compulsively dualizes; Very
by the doubletalk of insisting (with some justice?) that the sick reader can't follow the conversation that the speaker is holding
with the reader's inner self (paradoxically portrayed
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here as the more public and exterior of the two selves) from whom he is separated by his sickbed. Both poems' speakers critique
the speciousness of personality as we ordinarily think of it, and point to a transpersonal form of self-realization that is arrived at
by coming to terms with a more universal form of being that lies more deeply within the self than the mundane ego fathoms.
Very intensifies the paradox of inner = universal by representing the superficial self as "buried" in its sickbed, while the true
inner self communicates with the spirit.
Very's evangelical voice makes his mode of impersonality more parochial, also more "lyric," than Emerson's exoticization of the
impersonal through the mask of "Brahma." This is an exemplary difference. Looking in Very's direction, we descry a series of
poems in which a more or less determinate speaker aspires to a state of transpersonality; in Emerson's direction, we find a group
of authoritative-sounding voices who seem to function as temporary loci of the universal. Two short Thoreau poems will
illustrate this.
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
("Smoke")
Here lies the body of this world,
Whose soul alas to hell is hurled.
This golden youth long since was past,
Its silver manhood went as fast,
And iron age drew on at last;
'Tis vain its character to tell,
The several fates which it befell,
What year it died, when 'twill arise,
We only know that here it lies.
("Epitaph on the World")
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In the first poem, printed in Walden, the speaker revises mythology by mythologizing himself (with smoke as his proxy) as an
upward-soaring Icarus of godlike pretense. In the second, a poem that could almost have been by Jonson or Prior or Pope (take
your choice, depending upon whether you hear the tone as solemn, mocking, or borderline), he coolly surveys the fate of the
world from a godlike height. In the one poem the speaker performs an action; in the other the speaker is nothing more more
than a voice. In each, however, the ritualistic quality of the prosody (following from the genres of invocation and epitaph)
conspires with other elements to push the poem toward the condition of speakerlessness.
But the eclipse of the speaker in Transcendentalist poetry, these Thoreau poems show, is really after all less a matter of
transcending individuality than of reluctance to create a lyric voice to begin with. Consider Bronson Alcott's decision to write
his New Connecticut in the third person and replay autobiographical detail similarly to Whitman in the first part of ''There Was a
Child Went Forth," as if to illustrate the adventures of a typical "farmer's boy" and "pedler" (the two autobiographical chapters
presented here). With the exception of Channing the Transcendentalists rarely showed any sustained interest in experimenting
more than fitfully with a semiautobiographical persona like those of Wordsworth, Whitman, and Dickinson. Alcott, for example,
records what clearly seem to be autobiographical details with an almost total absence of subjective feeling:
Of letters mindful, emulous of lore,
Not willingly let he occasion slip
To chalk upon his mother's cleanly floor
His earliest essays at rude penmanship.
Even Transcendentalist poetry that adheres less doggedly to pre-Romantic models, as Thoreau does to invocation and epitaph or
Alcott does to Neoclassical bucolics (cf. Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer's Boy), often hesitates to develop an interiorized
speaker. The Emerson poem closest to the greater romantic lyric, "Musketaquid," illustrates this hesitancy. In it a determinate
speaker pictures himself disporting within a determinate nurturing landscape, but there is no localized moment, no unique event,
no temporality to the poem. The speaker bathes, breathes, follows, findsbut in no case engages in any specific action:
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what's recorded is a series of characteristic gestures, rather, to the end of celebrating the nurturance of what emerges as a quite
generic vision of the rural landscape as home ("meadows bottomless," "broad orchards resonant with bees," etc.). Likewise,
Margaret Fuller's "Thoughts,'' seems to promise a particularized experience (the subtitle reads, "On Sunday Morning, when
Prevented by a Snow Storm from Going to Church") of a localized ex cathedra lyric meditation, but the poem develops as a
series of generalized ideas, "Ours is the faith of Reason," "There is a blessing in a day like this," etc. Fuller's finest poem,
"Meditations," another mid-length sequence of religious musings set against a naturescape more fully realized, and featuring a
speaker that is more dramatized, again imagines the subjective experience in summarizing, almost paradigmatic terms ("To-day,
for the first time, I felt the Deity, / And uttered prayer on hearing thunder").
More often than not the development of the subjective mood in Transcendentalist poetry expresses loss or lack of selfintegration. In Emerson's "Days" the speaker's position of distinct self-defined separateness is the measure of his inadequacy and
vulnerability:
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
One insufficiently grasped reason why this poem has consistently impressed readers is its terse enactment of the Blakean myth
of the fall into individuality. The first six lines, spoken to all appearances by no determinate speaker, present the tableau of the
days and its meaning with a confidence that belies the subtone of wonderment and mysteriousness. With the ensuing shift from
archetypal image to personal anecdote, the subtone takes over the poem to produce a mood of frustration, regret, and selfdissatisfaction. The vision of the inadequacy of the self to command the resources of the day, in other words, is "enact-
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ed" by a speakerly "lapse" from the authoritative impersonality to vulnerable subjectiveness.
This studied anticlimacticism is not unique in the Emerson canon, although "Days" is the most striking example of it. At the end
of "Hamatreya" the force of the Earth-Song's retort to the complacent propertarian farmers ("Earth endures / Stars abide . . . /
But where are old men?'') is signaled by a sudden subjective shift:
When I heard the Earth-song
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.
Awakening to mortality correlates with awakening to subjectivity. A similar thing happens in "Uriel." This poem starts with a
bardic assertiveness ("It fell in the ancient periods / Which the brooding soul surveys") that is maintained through the narrative
of Uriel's confusion-producing defiance of orthodoxy. But then Uriel is shown as lapsing into "a sad self-knowledge, withering."
He becomes a diminished being, a bit like Milton's Satan as Paradise Lost unfolds, although even at the end he maintains a
certain archangelic ironic hauteur. Given this pattern in "Days," "Hamatreya," and "Uriel," it is not surprising that Emerson
could finish "Threnody," his elegy to his young son, only by imagining Waldo's individuality merged with the infinite as part of
an orderly cosmic process.
Emerson's early poem, "Each and All," provides an oblique commentary upon this notion of the risks of subjectivity. Its theme is
the necessary interdependence of the animate parts that go to make up a world: "All are needed by each one; / Nothing is good
or fair alone." This is initially presented in a voice befitting the doctrine, the voice of the impersonal epigrammatist who speaks
the aforesaid couplet. Then, however, follow three anecdotes, the first two seemingly autobiographical, of disappointment at the
results of taking individual items out of their contextual ensembles: a wild bird put in a cage, seashells fetched from the shore, a
bride who seems to lose her magic when taken from "the virgin train" where the bridegroom first longingly espied her. The
contemplation of these disillusions the speaker ("Then I said, 'I covet truth; / Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat'"). But then, in
another reversal, he becomes newly aware of his contextoutdoors on a beautiful summer dayand his alienation fades as he
merges into the all: "Beauty through
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my senses stole; / I yielded myself to the perfect whole." By means of this sequence the poem strongly suggests that the selfcenteredness of the perceiving ego is the price of individuation. Individuation is the problem, not the solution; the solution is for
personality to be absorbed back into the all, so that the speaker returns as it were to the state of healthful impersonality
maintained in the first part of the poem. Seeing this we understand the full satirical purport of the three exempla, such as the
weirdly misogynous-seeming anecdote of the bridegroom's disillusion immediately after marriage. The point is that the man's
behavior is perversely appropriative, and that this perversity is of the same genre as the speaker's petulantly egocentric rejection
of the enchantment of the world as a mere show of appearances. Reviewing the poem as a whole, we perceive, further, that the
author never really allowed the pathology of subjectiveness to do much more than begin to assert itself, inasmuch as the I-mood
is really an illustrative device to substantialize an argument rather than an indulgence of subjective lyricism. Hence the
indifference of ascribing the three individual anecdotes to "my" experience (bird and shells) or "another"'s (bride).
If Emerson is the Transcendentalist poet in whom a critique of subjectiveness is most adroitly developed and deployed at the
stylistic level, it is Ellery Channing who dwells most obsessively upon the correlation between subjectivity and inadequacy.
Channing's poems using a generic or impersonal speaker radiate an easy grace and cheerfulness of spirit, ranging from the
mellow to the jaunty, distinct from the characteristic voices of the rest of the Transcendentalist cohort:
He came and waved a little silver wand,
He dropped the veil that hid a statue fair,
He drew a circle with that pearly hand,
His grace confined that beauty in the air;
Those limbs so gentle, now at rest from flight,
Those quiet eyes now musing on the night.
This little personification of "Moonlight" shows a relaxed, nonprogrammatic command over visual nuances refreshing to
encounter amid the documents of Transcendentalist striving. As Channing verges toward confessional, however, his tone loses
its composure and becomes rattled, defensive, and self-pitying. The retrogression can be measured by considering as a series his
four most ambitious narrative poems: "Wachusett" (1856), a topographical ramble in couplets remi-
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niscent of Neoclassical locodescriptivism; Near Home (1858) and The Wanderer (1871), two works in which the speaker
juxtaposes himself at length to a series of more-or-less idealized figures more-or-less modeled on Thoreau; and Eliot (1885), a
long remorseful Byronic wallow featuring a Channing-like protagonist who feels himself deserted and abandoned by those he
now realizes he cared for. "Wachusett," the best of Channing's longer works, maintains a kind of crisp assurance by endowing
the speaker with the diagnostic omniscience traditional to this genre:
Baptist, and Methodist, and Orthodox,
And even Unitarian, creed that shocks
Established church-folk; they are one to me,
Who in the different creeds the same things see,
But I love dearly to look down at them,
In rocky landscapes like Jerusalem.
But as Channing's voice gets more reflexive its brittleness surfaces as a felt problem:
fancy the dull man wandering round
As I, vexing the sly world with questions,
Heard his queries solved and plainly answered:
.....................................
Conceive I held all, clearly explicate,
Here in my hand: might I so front the wood?
Should it not flout and leer? cast grinning outlooks?
It is not hard to imagine the voices of these two passages issuing from the same person, but in the latter the awareness of
vulnerability that arises from the mood of query rather than pronouncement totally destroys the speaker's confidence and causes
him to turn the satire of the first passage against himself This is a plight that Jones Very, by contrast, does not fall into, because
he almost never lets his speaker be vulnerable.
The closest Very comes to this is in his more tender poems of pious assurance, like "The Presence":
I sit within my room, and joy to find
That Thou who always lov'st, art with me here,
That I am never left by Thee behind,
But by thyself Thou keep'st me ever near;
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The fire burns brighter when with Thee I look,
And seems a kinder servant sent to me;
With gladder heart I read thy holy book,
Because thou art the eyes by which I see;
This aged chair, that table, watch and door
Around in ready service ever wait;
Nor can I ask of Thee a menial more
To fill the measure of my large estate,
For Thou thyself, with all a father's care,
Where'er I turn, art ever with me there.
This poem expresses a feeling that Thoreau once pointed out is surprisingly rare in English poetry: genuine, spontaneous
affection for God. To a degree, Very resembles George Herbert here. But only to a degree: for there is no hesitancy, no
insecurity about the speaker's claim of closeness to God: no possibility of slippage, of falling into perversity, or of God declining
to show favor. The sonnet renders what to all appearances is a permanent state of grace, but to the extent that it depicts as
indefinite continuation what is in the real world a transient peak experience it transforms the speaker into a superhuman being
quite unlike Herbert's personae. In this Very follows the Transcendentalist preference for defining the self in terms of its loftiest
possibilities. In a quieter way Christopher CranchTranscendentalism's next-most-prolific sonneteerdoes the same in "The
Garden":
Naught know we but the heart of summer here.
On the tree-shadowed velvet lawn I lie,
And dream up through the close leaves to the sky,
And weave Arcadian visions in a sphere
Of peace. The steaming heat broods all around,
But only lends a quiet to the hours.
The aromatic life of countless flowers,
The singing of a hundred birds, the sound
Of rustling leaves, go pulsing through the green
Of opening vistas in the garden walks.
Dear Summer, on thy balmy breast I lean,
And care not how the moralist toils or talks;
Repose and Beauty preach a gospel too,
Deep as that sterner creed the Apostles knew.
Cranch's trappings are more typically Transcendentalist than Very: not the evangelical piety of the prayer closet but the natural
piety of
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the orchard. Yet the mood and place are basically the same. Here, too, perfect peace, perfect calm, perfect security. Here, too,
the security of the enclosed setting completely responsive to the speaker's needs. Like Very's furniture, the presences in Cranch's
garden "around in ready service ever wait" to minister to the speaker. The secularization of bliss in Cranch's poem combines
with the greater degree of metrical informality (the degree of enjambment, for instance) to provide the illusion of a rather
quotidian, personalized speaker figure compared to Very's persona, who at first seems an artifact of dogma by comparison. Yet
Cranch's Adamic "I" is no less an allegorical contrivance, no less a figure or exemplar of the awakened consciousness, only
awakened in this case into the realm of Arcadia rather than into the realm of the Apostles.
To achieve this allegorical-uplifting effect one needn't present the speaker in a state of perfect security or bliss. This is clear
from Thoreau's most polished poem, "Sic Vita." Here are the first two of its seven stanzas.
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I'm fixed.
Written to accompany a gift of flowers, this poemlike Herbert's "The Altar" or "The Flower"represents graphically the image it
describes, in this case a loosely assembled bouquet. This visual pun, the device of the extended metaphor of ego as bouquet, the
rhetorical mode of assertive statement, make the poem speak, however, in a voice that's opposite the state of passivity and
ephemeralness to which the persona confesses. This was a method Emerson had mastered before him, as in "Grace," which a
fellow Transcendentalist mistook for Herbert's work.
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How much, preventing God, how much I owe
To the defences thou hast round me set;
Example, custom, fear, occasion slow,
These scorned bondmen were my parapet.
I dare not peep over this parapet
To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below,
The depths of sin to which I had descended,
Had not these me against myself defended.
Those scorned bondmen were the speaker's parapet in more ways than he perhaps intended. They did not simply provide him
with the internalized restraints on conduct to which he directly refers. In the person's capacity as speaker they provided him with
a rhetorical parapet of allegorization by which to defend against having to dip into the experience of sin even at the fantasy
level. They provided an apparatus that would restrain subjectivity, indeed would altogether alleviate the need to present a
speaker in the predicament of feeling tempted, by transposing a hypothetical narrative into a configuration and a sensibility
supposed to be fragile into a state of prayerful resolve, the crisis safely past: a state in which the "me" is nowhere near becoming
an individual. Perhaps the greatest defense that the scorned bondmen provide is that they keep the speaker safely generic:
grammatically an I, effectively an everyman.
The moral conservatism of Emerson's "Grace," anomalous among his better poems, contrasts diametrically with Ellen Hooper's
stunning untitled poem on a similar subject.
Better a sin which purposed wrong to none
Than this still wintry coldness at the heart,
A penance might be borne for evil done
And tears of grief and love might ease the smart.
But this self-satisfied and cold respect
To virtue which must be its own reward,
Heaven keep us through this danger still alive,
Lead us not into greatness, heart-abhorred
Oh God, who framed this stern New-England land,
Its clear cold waters, and its clear, cold soul,
Thou givest tropic climes and youthful hearts
Thou weighest spirits and dost all control
Teach me to wait for allto bear the fault
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That most I hate because it is my own.
And if I fail through foul conceit of good,
Let me sin deep so I may cast no stone.
This is one of the neglected gems of Transcendentalist poetics: moving eloquently and surefootedly from the opening
declaration to the remarkable affirmation of willingness, in effect, to be damned in order to escape from the Sahara of smugness.
It is such a poem as Hester Prynne might have writtenhad she been a poetafter her seven years of alienation. In direct contrast to
"Grace" the speaker here identifies the bondmen Emerson praises as the cause of a state worse than sin and invokes God to help
her fight free of their restraints. Better the deep sin than self-repression in the parapet of respectability. The speaker's
vehemence, and the striking paradoxes of the "foul conceit of good" (which recalls the "meek lover of the good" in Emerson's
"Brahma") and of imagining God as a possible accessory to mortal sin (which goes well beyond anything in Emerson, even the
''devil's child" passage in "Self-Reliance")these elements at first create the impression of a more subjective speaker than that of
"Grace." But not altogether so. The sentiment is more idiosyncratic, yes, but the experience is not made more subjective. "Sin"
remains abstract, the speaker's inner state a tissue of abstractions"wintry coldness," "self-satisfied and cold respect." Just as
"Grace" leaves unsaid the experience that the parapet kept from happening, so this poem leaves unsaid the experience that might
happen if the speaker were to leap from it. In each poem, the ceremonial of invocation turns the "I" effectively into a "we."
The genericization of the nominally subjective speaker in Transcendentalist poetry is related to its interest in what superficially
looks like Victorian dramatic monologue. Emerson especially favors this form, in such poems as "Alphonso of Castile,"
"Mithridates," "Étienne de la Boece," "Merlin," "Saadi," "The Nun's Aspiration," and "Brahma." These poems I call
"superficially" like Victorian dramatic monologue because Emerson makes little attempt to record the internal fluctuations of
mood or the stylistic variance between cases that Browning introduced into Men and Women. This should not be held against
him, as a sign that he tried and failed to do what Browning and Tennyson did better. For their psychological and linguistic
realism was of very little interest to Emerson, who, significantly, favored the highly stylized Idylls of the King over all the other
works of these two poets. Alphonso, Mithridates, and the rest are not, for Emerson, individual conscious-
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nesses but conceptual positions. To move from one to another is to vary the attitude (e.g., Brahmas Olympian elusiveness vs.
Merlin's vehemence) but not the level of abstraction.
A good way to verify and calibrate this point is to look at the shifts of speaker that occur occasionally, very occasionally, within
Transcendentalist poems. Rarely are these shifts registered by major stylistic shifts. The case of Emerson's "Hamatreya" is less
typical than his "Merlin's Song." "Hamatreya" makes a modest attempt to use vernacular for his farmers ("This suits me for a
pasture; that's my park'') and oracular language for the Earth-song ("But the heritors? / Fled like the flood's foam"). In "Merlin's
Song," on the other hand, Emerson moves from outer to inner speaker without a hitch:
Hear what British Merlin sung,
Of keenest eye and truest tongue.
Say not, the chiefs who first arrive
Usurp the seats for which all strive
Even more striking is the seeming identity of the voices of sphinx, poet, and persona in "The Sphinx," given the debate
structure of the poem and the technical difference of estate between mythological figure and mundane narrator.
This monoglossia holds true also for the movement's most ambitious dramatic poem, Cranch's Satan: A Libretto (1874; later
republished under the title of "Ormuzd and Ahriman"). Cranch here converts the tradition of romantic Satanism into the most
probing exploration of the philosophy of evil in Transcendentalist poetry. Satan is the text's main theologian, and the message he
announces to a rather confused chorus of spirits, predictably enough, is that he is not what he is thought to be: "I / Am but the
picture mortal eyes behold." The traditional Christian view of sacred history as hinging upon a holy war between God and Satan
is a dualistic fiction perpetrated by mortals unwilling to see the monistic principle of love as the one supersensible force. This is
essentially a mythologization in the garb of Prometheus Unbound of Emerson's doctrine of "Compensation"that polarity is
omnipresent in the phenomenal world but nonexistent in the noumenal realm of the soul's inmost nature.
Naught evil, though it were the Prince of evil,
Hath being in itself. For God alone
Existeth in Himself, and good, which lives
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As sunshine lives, born of the Parent Sun.
I am the shadow of that Sun,
Opposite, not opposing, only seen
Upon the underside.
................
I symbolize the wild and deep
And unregenerated wastes of life,
Dark with transmitted tendencies of race,
And blind mischance . . .
As in Shelley, Cranch's beautiful idealisms of moral excellence are differentiated prosodically (Satan and the Archangel Raphael
speak in blank verse, the spirits generally in rhymed tetrameter) but not linguistically or in respect to degree of reflexiveness or
interiorization. Through them doctrinal attitudes are ventriloquized and attached to names and shadowy figures as positions, not
personalities, engage in debate.
Transcendentalist poetry is therefore by and large not a poetry of particularized experience interested in psychological
complication but a poetry of attitudes expressed by turns in aphoristic statements, tableaux of images, narratives and monologues
of typic figures, whether they call themselves "I" or Xenophanes. The Wordsworth of "Tintern Abbey" was less interesting to
the Transcendentalists than the Wordsworth of the Immortality Ode; the Milton of the great autobiographic asides in Paradise
Lost or the sonnet on his blindness was less interesting to them than the Milton of "Il Penseroso." The preceding analysis has
followed the standard practice of featuring Emerson's poetry more conspicuously than that of the rest of the Transcendentalist
group, in agreement with the usual estimate of its relative quality and impact, but not the customary approach of treating the
poets one by one; for the commonality of their thematic-stylistic repertoire, through serendipity and cross-fertilization, seems to
require presenting their work as an ensemble, at least at the points disussed. On these points the group seems fairly unified.
In those fundamental respects the poetry of Transcendentalism seems as closely akin to Neoclassical and Metaphysical poetry as
to the "poetry of experience" of the Romantics and Victorians, more akin to Dickinson than to Whitman, more akin to the
Fireside poets (Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier) than either to Dickinson or to
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Whitman. Where the TranscendentalistsEmerson and Thoreau, at leastmore closely anticipate their two great American
successors is in their degree of prosodic experiment: the roughening and breaking and shifting of meters.
Go, blindworm, go,
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife!
(Emerson, "Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing")
Conscience is instinct bred in the house,
Feeling and Thinking propagate the sin
By an unnatural breeding in and in.
I say, Turn it out doors,
Into the moors.
(Thoreau, "Conscience")
Emerson's prophetic rage deforms the baseline iambic trimeter almost beyond recognition. Thoreau starts out with a loose
dactyl-trochee form that gets increasingly doggerelized and clipped, starting in line threea metrical reflection of his protest
against the forms of a socially rather than naturally produced conscience. Thoreau is careful to act out his deviationism at the
linguistic level as well: breaking one's meter correlates with vernacularizing one's syntax and language.
In Emerson's numerous prose reflections and poems about poesis (a favorite topic for Cranch and Channing also), something
like a theory of prosodic deviance emerges. On the one hand, Emerson fancifully imagines prosody as sanctioned by the nature
of things: he traces rhythm to pulse-beat, rhyme to the principle of polarity:
The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs;
Balance-loving Nature
Made all things in pairs.
("Merlin," part 2)
Yet, Emerson stresses,
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
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As with hammer or with mace;
That they may render back
Artful thunder . . .
("Merlin," part 1)
The passage enacts what it would describe, as does the ode to Channing, which, along with "Bacchus," is Emerson's most
impressive act of metrical deformation: the first a thunderous jeremiad, the latter an exuberant piece of metrical inebriation from
which Dickinson might have derived "I taste a liquor never brewed."
Such Emersonian and Thoreauvian experiments might be seen as anticipating Whitmanian free verse and Dickinsonian offrhyme (cf. Emerson's "go"/"Mexico"as well as the wonderful half-rhymes throughout the first stanza of "Threnody," as Emerson
moves from the heights of ''desire" to the sonorous depths of "mourn.") To take these liberties as protests against "rules" of
poetic form is to credit them, up to a point justly, as serious expressions of the Transcendentalist program of disrupting
orthodoxy at every level and as symptoms and harbingers of the antiformalism often claimed to be one of the most distinctive
marks of the American poetic tradition from Whitman and Dickinson to the present.
This argument, however, requires severe qualification in several respects that force us to a different view of Transcendentalist
and perhaps even also American poetics than is commonly espoused. First, Transcendentalist, Whitmanian, and Dickinsonian
prosodic disruptions were all only part of a state of prosodic ferment that started in the early Romantic era with the revival of
popular forms like balladry and (in Blake) fourteeners and that reached an unprecedented height in the mid-nineteenth century
in the work of Poe (cf. his pride in the novelty of the meter of "The Raven"), Browning (who deliberately wrote craggy, clotted
blank verse), Longfellow (his revival of hexameter, his quixotic experiment with trochees in Hiawatha), and the virtuosity of
Tennyson and Swinburne. Second, it is not clear that history will show antiformalism to be the primary thrust of either
Transcendentalism or American poetics generally. To put this more explicitly: Whitmanian openness may prove to have been
less pervasive in American poetry than the more restrained experimentation represented by the Transcendentalists' lover's
quarrels with bound forms and, in the next generation, by the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Robinson, Frost, much of
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Pound and Eliot and Stevens; Dunbar and McKay and Countee Cullen; John Crowe Ransom, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Francis,
Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilburtheir prosody can be referred back, in most cases by analogy rather than
genealogy of course, to the aesthetic of liberty-within-restraint represented by Transcendentalism's subjection of bound forms to
pressure and deformation. In varying degrees much of their work also recalls Transcendentalism's sublimation of the subjectified
persona and narrative-descriptive amplification to a rhetoric of cerebral rather than visceral intensity committed to filtering
represented experience through the lens of philosophic or moral reflection.
This diagnosis puts what is often disparagingly thought of as the conservatism of Transcendentalist and American poetry in its
proper light. A Whitman-centered account of American poetics makes the contrast between Anglo and American poetics
pleasantly dramatic at the expense of the truth, the truth finally even of Whitman himself. More accurate than an autochthonous
myth of American poetic history that winds up dancing around a selective version of Whitman, fathered by an even more
selective version of Emerson, would be a myth of American poesis as part of a transatlantic Anglophone community almost as
interlinked in the nineteenth century as in the High Modernist era, a narrative in which the splitting out of the Transcendentalist
group quickly seems artificial except insofar as it helps one to concentrate on how Transcendentalist poems reflect the play of
certain ideas more or less peculiar to the movement. Yet I must also immediately amend that statement, because to take the first
steps toward the critical revision I propose it is imperative to focus one's intellectual energies more intensively on
Transcendentalist poetry for awhile, in order to convince oneself that the best of it does indeed deserve a place on the literaryhistorical map once again being redrawn as the millennium approaches: that it gains, not loses, in interest when seen as more a
traditional than a proto-Whitmanian artifact, and that its conservatism is as important a key as its iconoclasm to understanding
what it tells us about the historyand the achievementof American poetry as a whole.
Lawrence Buell
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Further Reading
Buell, Lawerence. Literary Transendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1973.
Hennessy, Helen. "Tne Dial: Its Poetry and Poetic Criticism." New England Quarterly (1958), 31:6687.
Miller, Perry, ed. The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957.
The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.
Stauffer, Donald Barlow. "The Transcendentalists." In Donald Barlow Stauffer, ed., A Short History of American Poetry, pp.
93114. New York: Dutton, 1974.
Yoder, R. A. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
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Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts; she had an older brother, Austin (b. April 1828)
and a younger sister, Lavinia (b. February 1833). Her father and grandfather were successful lawyers and politicians; both were
active in the affairs of Amherst College, which, along with two other men, her grandfather had founded. The Dickinsons were a
closely knit family, and all three children were lifelong residents of Amherst. When Austin married (in 1855), he and his wife
lived next door to the parental home; neither Lavinia nor Emily married.
The one major trauma in Dickinson's life was severe eye trouble: she suffered several episodes of blindness in the early 1860s,
and in 1864 and 1865 she made two long visits to Boston to be treated by an eye surgeon. Although she had been vivacious and
socially active in her young womanhood, in the 1860s she became increasingly reluctant to engage in a social life that entailed
going into public, perhaps because of this visual disability. Very few facts are known about her private life, which appears to
have been relatively quiet.
Dickinson seems to have begun writing seriously in about 1848, and there was nothing in the least secretive about it: she
enjoyed a local reputation for great wit, and many of her poems were read by family and friends. Moreover, in April 1862 she
initiated a correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a highly respected Boston man of letters, and the poet regularly
included her work in the correspondence, which continued until her death in May 1886. Nonetheless, only about fourteen poems
were published during her lifetime.
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After Emily's death her sister Lavinia discovered 1776 poems among the papers. Lavinia took about half of these to Austin's
close friend, Mabel Loomis Todd; and together with Higginson, Mrs. Todd published a slender selection in 1890 (with major
editorial revisions to "regularize" them). During the course of the next more than half-century a steady stream of Emily
Dickinson's poetry "leaked" out to the public; however, it was often so thoroughly mutilated by the editorial process that readers
could make no clear assessment of the poet's work.
Finally, in 19511955 a reliable variorum edition of the Complete Poems was published by Thomas Johnson, and only then did
"Emily Dickinson" make her entrance into the world.
The poet Lydia Sigourney, whose creative years coincided with Emily Dickinson's, was both celebrated and rewarded in her
day. In his essay, "Autobiography in the American Renaissance," Lawrence Buell reminds us that it was Sigourney who
produced "the first full-dress autobiography written by an American author of either sex whose primary vocation was creative
writing," and he goes on to observe that
the record is altogether a striking mixture of literary modesty and self-advertisement, dramatizing the offsetting point that
personal literary aspirations mustn't come first but also asserting that they have given her life its ultimate direction. Or to
put the matter another way, Sigourney accepts society's proposition that literary professionalism is tolerable only when it
does not "interfere with the discharge of womanly duty"; she structures [the account of] her life accordingly, so that the
literary achievement comes after and (she argues) as an outgrowth of a domesticity that she refuses to see as other than
fully satisfying.
To some, Sigourney's constructions of "the woman as author" may seem coy or disingenuous; however, Sigourney herself saw
them as necessary defensive maneuvers in a society that read her work voraciously, but had little or no tolerance for the notion
that a woman might take the profession of writing seriously.
Consider the reception of Fanny Fern's female bildungsroman, Ruth Hall, in 1854. Although the novel was effusively domestic,
it nonetheless portrayed the antifeminist bias of the public world in frankly indignant terms; as a consequence, it was excoriated
by critics who called it "unnatural," "irreverent," and "unfeminine." Thus if everyday experience in mid-nineteenth-century
America had not taught the woman who would be an author the wisdom of remaining an entirely private
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person and the danger of revealing her commitment to vocation, the reception of this scandalous, but immensely popular piece
of fiction produced a public demonstration of that lesson in Emily Dickinson's twenty-fourth year. Consider, now, Dickinson's
ambivalent attitude toward publication. Consider her ultimate decision not to accept the professional role of "author" during her
lifetime. For decades, critics (most of them male) have judged these to be proofs of eccentricity. Considered in the contemporary
context, however, does it not seem more an evidence of prudence and of the determination to enjoy aesthetic autonomyto be the
unchallenged "eye/I" that scrutinizes and defines, and not the mere object of gaze?
Walt Whitman was her fraternal twin in many ways: he defied the moral pieties of the day; he radically subverted the accepted
patterns of rhythm, rhyme, and linguistic usage. But because he was a man who had worked in the newspaper and printing
businessa man who was well acquainted with the marketing principles of the publishing worldfrom the very beginning of his
career Whitman took immense care to construct a public image of "The Poet." He crafted a voice for the preface to the first
edition of Leaves of Grass that promises to speak (without restraint) for all the people; he included a frontispiece engraving of
himself in working clothes, hand on hip, facing the reader with (apparently) nothing whatsoever to hide. And as time went on, he
organized a prodigous proliferation of photographic images"Walt Whitman," who became (convincingly) the "good gray poet."
This entire campaign, which need not have been false merely because it was self-conscious, imposed powerful limitations upon
the reader's constructive imagination, and, as a consequence, we are inclined to read Whitman's poetry with his image of "The
Poet" in mind.
The same cannot be said for Dickinson. Poetically she was a comparable rebel: her work defied the moral truisms of midVictorian America; it violated the accepted practices of versification even more boldly than Whitman's work; and what was
probably most deviant, it had been authored by a serious female poet in an age when women were not supposed to take writing
seriously in any way. Ironically, posterity stood in need of some comprehensive construction of "The Poet" from Emily
Dickinson even more than it did from the assiduously inventive Mr. Whitman; however, the mores of the historical moment
imposed all but insuperable impediments to a woman author's providing such a
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construction (as the example of Lydia Sigourney demonstrates). Thus, Emily Dickinson wrote no prose essay of any sort about
"The Poet"; and as for pictures, only one stilted daguerreotype of the adolescent Emilie Dickinson remains. To put the matter
succinctly: Dickinson left us the work (a concatenation of brilliant, sometimes cryptic poetry), but she utterly declined to
bequeath her version of "The Poet."
And so, Dickinson's posthumous readers have constructed their own accounts of "The Poet."
In 1890, in a preface to the first published selection of her poems, Thomas Wentworth Higginson laid out the essential elements
of the standard scenario: he defined Dickinson's work as a pure "expression of the writer's own mind . . . verses . . . like poetry
torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them." This original construction of "Emily Dickinson, 'the
poet,' "served not to clarify the work, but to hint at the possibility of a tantalizing mystery. Indeed, the problem of understanding
this poetry has been compounded by a number of "mystifying" factors. First, until the Thomas Johnson variorum edition of the
Complete Poems (19511955), Dickinson's work was published in bits and piecessporadically and in corrupted form. Second,
Dickinson commands an astonishing range of tone, attitude, voice, and subjectall the while speaking as "I" (what Michel
Foucault has termed the "first person'' of the "second self," an "author-function" that it would be false to identify with the real
author). Third, the poems are dense and powerful; they would be difficult under the best of circumstances. Fourth, like
Whitman, in her strongest poems Dickinson sometimes uses such radically subversive tactics that they disrupt the cohesive
properties of language itself (which was her intent). Finally, the entire corpus is so large that merely becoming conversant with
every part of it is a prodigious task.
Confronted with an alluring enigma of such proportions, many readers have begun by accepting the central notions of
Higginson's construction. They have presumed that Dickinson's work was in some fundamental way spontaneous (an emanation
of "natural" genius rather than the product of meticulous, self-conscious, highly literate craftsmanship); and they have held,
almost as an article of faith, that the poems are essentially, even exclusively personal (that is, morbidly self-focusedthe versified
responses to some particular series of events in the poet's life). Finally, building upon such premises, these readers have
supposed that the best way to under stand the poetry was first to con-
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struct "The Poet." The result has been a dizzying array of "possible 'Poets' ": Dickinson in the throes of insanity (sometimes
hysteria; sometimes depression); Dickinson the disappointed lover (the genders of the beloved object have varied according to
fashion); Dickinson the would-be suicide; Dickinson the survivor of an abortion, the victim of Porphyria, of lupus, etc., etc.
American authors have sometimes done rather peculiar things that are a matter of historical fact (Hawthorne lived reclusively in
his mother's attic for eight years), but in most cases we have been willing to make some distinction between the work and the
person who wrote it. Not so with Emily Dickinson. In her case, we have developed fanciful constructions of "The Poet'' first,
and then we have deployed them in an attempt to understand the poetry.
In his suggestive essay, "What is an Author," Michel Foucault explains how this construction of "The Author" can shape our
understanding of a text. Those "aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author . . . are projections, in terms always
more or less psychological, of our [own] way of handling texts." Thus the "author-function" inheres in the reader (and not
intrinsically in the authoralthough she or he may undertake to influence it, as Whitman did): in extreme cases, it may become the
dominant component of the reading process and may be used to explain "the presence of certain events within a text, as well as
their transformations, distortions . . . and modifications." Such has often been the case with the readers of Emily Dickinson's
poetry.
At the outset of this discussion of Dickinson's work, then, let me enumerate the assumptions about "The Poet" that inform it.
1. Emily Dickinson was highly intelligent, probably more intelligent than most of her readers.
2. She suffered from severe eye trouble, and by 1860 or 1861, she had become reluctant to leave the familiarity of her home and
its grounds. Subsequent to several operations on her eyes (in 1864 and 1865 when she was in her mid-thirties and had already
written the greater part of her poetry), her reticence seems to have become absolute. Until her final years, these were her only
major illnesses: she suffered from no serious mental illness save this home-boundedness in her later years.
3. Her poetry is "about" no particular series of personal crises, not "about" Emily Dickinson: instead, it speaks
generallyaddressing the human-condition, not her individual personal situation. Dickinson's notion of the human condition was,
of course, influenced by her personal situation; in this respect, she is like all other poets.
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4. Coming from a family of sophisticated lawyers and politicians (both her father and grandfather served many terms in the
Massachusetts Legislature; her father served one term in the United States House of Representatives), she had a firm grasp of
political realities. The immense power of men in America did not escape her notice.
5. Having received a superb classical education and being naturally inclined to supplement it widely, she knew the standard
literary texts thoroughly; in addition, she knew the Bible virtually by heart.
6. She was a serious, systematic poet: for her, writing poetry was a vocation that demanded discipline, the freedom for intense
concentration, and craftsmanship.
7. She was ambitious (a trait that is most candidly expressed in her letters).
8. She was fiercely proud and independentunwilling to conflate vocation with celebrity, unwilling to tailor her work to placate
either the demands of latter-day Puritanism or the exigencies of the Victorian marketplace in America.
9. Nonetheless (like the major male poets of her day), she construed herself as working intimately and intrinsically within the
context of a literary heritage: poem after poem is matched against the work of other poetsGod (in the Bible), Emerson,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, Poe, Milton, Pope, Dante, Shakespeare, to cite a few.
10. She could perceive with ruthless clarity that this literary heritage had no natural place in it for a woman poet of her power
and ambition.
11. Thus she used the art of poetry subversively: she created a distinctive female voice of great power, and one use to which she
put it was the undermining of comfortable stereotypes and social pieties that falsified women's actual experiences. (It is this
subversive intention that is similar to Whitman's.)
12. One component of Dickinson's "modernism" can be defined by employing Myra Jehlen's distinction between "meaning" and
"knowledge.'' "'Meaning,' as it replaced 'knowledge,' was a linguistic entity that was fully and stably apprehensible, because its
components were wholly contained in the account itself. 'Knowledge,' on the other hand, was relational, and referred back
continuously to a reality it never entirely comprehended and that thus, in any given account of things, always remained
insurgent. One could say, in short, that knowledge is history while meaning is text." It follows, then, that no artist can alter our
understanding of history without first laying hold of language, repossessing it, and altering its meanings to conform to "reality."
If the game is "history" (or its handmaiden, "literature,"), the nonnegotiable preliminary struggle is over "language."
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Repossessing the linguistic and artistic forms of the patriarchy became the focus of Dickinson's art.
13. I've saved the best for last. She had a superb, mischievous, radically inventive sense of humor.
This is a long literal-minded list. Perhaps it could be summarized in this way: Emily Dickinson was a great poet who happened
to be a woman.
In his essay, "Myth and the Production of History," Richard Slotkin observes that "myth does not argue its ideology, it
exemplifies it." In Slotkin's terms, Emily Dickinson's work may be said to inscribe a new myth (and perhaps that is part of her
great appeal)that the power of a '' 'Woman' Poet" must be defined by the encompassing power of "Poet." She did not bother to
argue that women should write strong poetry; instead, she devised ways to create strong poetry as a woman poetrepeatedly
renegotiating forms and conventions that had long been established as singularly male. She invented these new strategies,
virtually ex nihilo. Understood in this way, her accomplishments are nothing short of astonishing.
For example, suppose that you are Emily Dickinson, and you want to write love poetry. You are serious and immensely gifted,
and you have virtually no appropriately gendered exemplars: in this genre, the traditional speaker is male, and the accepted role
for women is as the passive recipient or the objectified focus of praise and (perhaps) passion. Dickinson could, of course, look to
the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; under the circumstances, it would be surprising if there were no echoes. Thus one
noteworthy fact about Dickinson's love poetry is that it does not bear a greater resemblance to Sonnets from the Portuguese:
both Dickinson and E. B. Browning express passion; however, there is a textual density and complexity in Dickinson's work that
much exceeds E. B. Browning'sperhaps because Dickinson so boldly (and often humorously) subverts the traditions that have
failed to offer women an active voice.
One typical form for love poetry is the blazonverse that catalogues the beauties of the beloved. Dickinson would have become
acquainted with it from the work of Shakespeare and Campion; twentieth-century readers might know it from a poem like
Frost's "The Silken Tent" (that is, as a form, it has not yet gone out of fashionalthough it is still an implacably male-dominated
form). If Dickinson wanted to use it,
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how then could she proceed? Should she praise her beloved's brawny limbs and bearded cheeks? Should she boast that no other
woman could buy herself such a pretty piece of pulchritude? Put this way, the task sounds both silly and perhaps impossible;
however, unless Dickinson could get around such problems, she had to forego the form entirely. Her witty solution (Johnson
339) is a reconfigured blazon that retains the praise for a woman, but articulates it in the woman's own voice and on her own
terms.
The lovers are parted, and the woman thinks of her "Absentee" beloved:
I tend my flowers for thee
Bright Absentee!
And she becomes sexually aroused:
My Fuchsia's Coral Seams
Ripwhile the Sowerdreams
Geraniumstintand spot
Low Daisiesdot
My Cactussplits her Beard
To show her throat . . .
A HyacinthI hid
Puts out a Ruffled Head
And odors fall
From flasksso small
You marvel how they held
Every man is personally aware of the fact that sexual excitement will cause an erection; for this reason, phallic imagery finds its
way into love poetry. Every woman is personally aware of the fact that sexual excitement will cause the vulva to become
engorged, the clitoris to become erect, and secretions to suffuse the genitalia. It is this female process that Dickinson's poem
elaborates with such eloquent, metaphorical wit. True to the blazon convention, Dickinson's speaker praises a woman (herself!):
but she dislodges the praise from its usual, merely superficial level in order to exalt a more fundamental "feminine" capacity.
The "flasks," which configure both uterus and vagina, may seem "small"; however, during pregancy and birth, they have the
capacity to contain a baby! Thus the poem celebrates both passion and the possibilities for procreation that this passion signals.
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No longer the possession of a male lover and the object of his scrutiny, the female speaker of this poem is boldly selfpossessedpleased with the many dimensions of her sexuality and well-equipped to articulate their value. There is even a subtle
"political" statement here: an intimation that often the blazon becomes a fatuous form of love poetry that deals so imperfectly
with the complexities of an actual woman it can hardly be said to express real love at all. The best-known blazons of the
Elizabethan era were those that had been put to music. Thomas Campion's "There is a Garden" is one such poem, and it has
survived to have centuries of adolescents ridicule it for its fruit-and-vegetable delineation of the "feminine."
There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow . . .
There cherries grow which none may buy
Till cherry-ripe themselves do cry.
Perhaps the humor of Dickinson's intertextual "response"to Campion's poem in particular and more generally to a tradition of
love poetry that disempowers womenconstitutes the last laugh.
There are a number of consistent themes in Dickinson's love poetry; however, none is more pervasive than the insistence that the
two lovers be equal. Well aware that women had been cast into a subordinate role for thousands of years (and by innumerable
forms of social and religious convention), Dickinson would sometimes open a poem with some form of this traditional
configuration:
Forever at His side to walk
The smaller of the two!
Brain of His Brain
Blood of His Blood
Only suddenly to overturn it:
Two LivesOne Beingnow
Forever of His Fate to taste
If griefthe largest part
If joyto put my piece away
For that beloved Heart
All lifeto know each other
A junior colleague brought this poem (Johnson 246) to me, saying, "I would like to teach this, but I am puzzled by its tonalities.
On the one
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hand it seems to attack the male's tendency to dominate; but on the other, it seems a rather tender expression of affection."
Together we concluded that the poem rejected not men, but all the conventions that have defined the relationship between sexes
in such distorted and demeaning ways.
The poem announces its ultimate goal in the first word: neither man nor woman shall hold power over the other; they walk
together. Yet at first, the woman's "smaller" stature threatens to suggest an inevitably subordinate role. Fully to appreciate the
power with which Dickinson claims a different destiny for women, readers must realize that the language of her verse appeals to
an earlier poetic invocation of that precise moment in the ancient past when "love" is said to have begun, Eve and Adam in
Eden catching sight of each other for the very first time, rapt with wonder and eloquently innocent.
Just before the Fall, Eve speaks ingenuously to Adam of this first meeting: "What could I doe, / But follow strait, invisibly thus
led? / Til I espi'ed thee, fair indeed and tall, . . . back I turn'd, / Thou following cryd'st aloud, Return fair Eve, / Whom fli'st
thou? whom thou fli'st, of him thou art, / His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent / Out of my side to thee, neerest my heart
/ Substantial Life, to have thee by my side / Hencefore an individual solace dear; / Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim /
My other half" (Paradise Lost 4:475488). Dickinson's poetic "opponent" here is Milton, whose work she echoes in order to
italicize their different views of the appropriate relationship between the sexes. Adam and Eve began in loving equality, yet
Milton's poem justifies the Christian tradition of male dominance by claiming that it was precisely this parity that led humanity
into perdition. Thus our first parents were exiled from Paradise, and the woman was commanded to submit to the rule of the
man forever after. "Children thou shalt bring / In sorrow forth, and to thy Husband's will / Thine shall submit, he over thee shall
rule" (PL 10:194196; see also Genesis 3:16).
If a male poet were to work intertextually against Milton's Paradise Lost, he might do so in the spirit of combative
admirationattempting to prove that he could best Milton at his own game. Emily Dickinson has something quite different in
mind: she does not want to play this kind of combative "male" game; thus, she does not choose to match her manipulation of
blank verse against Milton's. Instead, she uses her
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poetry to repudiate the world view that Milton had defended, arguing that woman ought not subordinate herself to man. When
passion is generous, Dickinson's verse asserts, Edenic equality can persist even after the Fall. True lovers can create a new
"Paradise." Thus although the first two lines of this poem acknowledge the lovers' disparity, in the three lines that follow, those
feelings that unite them also dispel all discrepancies between them"Brain" and "Blood" perfectly matchedand equality is
affirmed.
Paradise Lost and Genesis are not the only prior texts whose cadences and notions inform this apparently slender, but
surprisingly complex argument for equality in love. Stanza two moves from the Old Testament to a reverberation from the New:
Jesus avowed, "Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death" (Matthew 16:28). Christ's
promise had been predicated upon Christian faith; Dickinson's redaction of this promise ("Forever of His fate to taste") ties
immortality to the power of the lovers' feelings for each other. And yet, almost immediately, with a kind of rapid glissando,
Dickinson moves from this Biblical intonation to the domestic experience of everyday men and women. A wife who is quite
confident in her autonomy and parity with her mate may still choose to share her husband's grief, may even choose to bear "the
largest part"; and if there is "joy," she may even decide to put her portion aside for him, like a dainty piece of pastry, an
affectionate surprise for her "beloved Heart.''
Other things are at work in this poem as well. Dickinson had a comprehensive, sophisticated education at the Amherst
Academy: the school's curriculum was especially strong in math and science, and no distinction was made between the
education of boys and girls. The poet's understanding of math extended even to the calculus, and her delight with mathematical
puzzles can often be found in the poetry (she is especially fond of ratios). In this poem she plays delicately with notions of finity
and infinity, equality and inequality; however, her "solution" is consistent. The absolute symmetry of love between peers.
Thus several things combine to make Dickinson's poetry inaccessible. One is the flexibility of tone along with the complexity
and density that characterizes virtually all of her best work. The poems, so short and so seemingly transparent, are simply
difficult according to the standards that scholars generally apply. The problem is not that Dickinson
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is weird or undisciplined in some exotic or clinical way; the problem is that, like John Donne, she is very demanding of her
reader. The difference is that most readers of Donne's poetry are willing to credit the self-conscious operation of genius and
talent, while many readers of Dickinson's poetry cling to some notion of an intensely personal, spontaneous form of writing in
her case.
In truth, however, there is a second problem that compounds the first. Far from being aesthetically "eccentric," Dickinson
deliberately set herself to work within her literary heritage: her verse contains resonances of the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Poeto name just a few. Yet painfully aware of the limitations that a male-centered heritage had
imposed upon women who wished to be poets, she almost always deploys her echoes of this heritage "against the grain." She is,
at one and the same time, canonical and anticanonical, and this extraordinary and unexpected combination has contributed in
large measure to our difficulty in "placing" her. One cannot simply ignore the male-authored, male-focused poetical tradition
that preceded her; one cannot comfortably read her work within that tradition, either, because her poems sustain a vital attitude
of strenuous contradictionnot arguing feminism, but enacting it. Under these circumstances it would be surprising if we did not
find Emily Dickinson's poetry difficult.
It helps a great deal to understand the attitudes that explicitly shaped her particular "moment" in American history.
Although Emily Dickinson did not begin the systematic process of making fair copies of her work until she was almost thirty,
her letters indicate that she had already begun to write seriously during her late adolescencein 1848 when she was about
eighteen. It was a time when American authors had begun to theorize about the process of writing poetry.
Two years earlier, in 1846, Edgar Allan Poe had published his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," in Graham's Magazine,
and even the most cursory glance at the American poetry that was generally published in the late 1840s will demonstrate the
pervasive influence of Poe's theories and practices. Gothic fiction raged throughout the monthly magazines, and lugubrious
poetry about death filled not only the pages of periodicals but the columns of newspapers as well. Although many serious poets
scorned Poe's work (Emerson called him "the jingle-
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man"), few failed to have some opinion of him in the late 1840s. Moreover, Poe had made a striking pronouncement about the
connection between women and art; and the prescriptive force of this statement continues even today to exert tremendous power
over the configuration of American culture. Poe declared that "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most
poetical topic in the worldand equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover."
If you are Emily Dickinsonthat is, if you are a woman who is also a poetsuch a prescription presents immediate and obvious
problems.
The assumption that men have a preemptive right to speak about women was deeply ingrained in virtually all the traditions that
Dickinson was forced to work with; however, Poe's unique construction of the "passive, silent woman" takes this notion to its
ultimate extremity. The woman is literally dead. How, then, to empower her? It is one mark of genius that Dickinson was able
to fashion some of her most masterful poems in response to this challengepoems in which the speaker (often explicitly gendered
female) has already died. In general Dickinson's tactic is to transform Poe's notion from an extremity of female passivity to an
ultimate form of feminine heroism in which the speaker explores the experiential "reality" of death itself.
Sometimes the timbre of Dickinson's poems about death have an air of bravura: "'Tis so appallingit exhilarates / So over Horror,
it half Captivates / . . . Looking at Death, is Dying / Just let go the Breath / And not the pillow at your Cheek / So Slumbereth."
Here, Poe's trope of the male lover looking at a dead woman becomes transformed into a woman poet who has the courage to
"look" squarely at death itselfprobing to discover the meaning of that final moment that awaits us all, and then imposing
aesthetic structures upon her insights. The result is a unique form of empowerment: "It sets the Fright at liberty / And Terror's
free / Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!" (Johnson 281). At other times, Dickinson combines this extraordinary notion of the speaking dead
with the matter-of-fact tones of everyday speech: "'Twas just this time, last year, I died. / I know I heard the Corn, / When I
was carried by the Farms'' (Johnson 445). In both cases Dickinson has transformed Poe's beautified picture of death into an
examination of the terrifying actuality that awaits us all.
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Modern readers are apt to comment upon the frequency with which Dickinson returns to this subject of death"How morbid,"
people say. Perhaps. But if Dickinson was morbid, so was everyone else in her culture. Poe's aestheticizing of death (along with
the proliferation of Gothic fiction and poetry) reflects a pervasive real-world concern: in mid-nineteenth-century America death
rates were high. It was a truism that men had three wives (two of them having predeceased the spouse); infant mortality was so
common that parents often gave several of their children the same name so that at least one "John" or "Lavinia" might survive to
adulthood; rapid urbanization had intensified the threat of certain diseasescholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis.
Poe and the Gothic tradition were one response to society's anxiety about death. Another came from the pulpit: mid-nineteenth
century sermons took death as their almost constant subject. Somewhat later in the century, preachers would embrace a doctrine
of consolation: God would be figured as a loving parentalmost motherlywho had prepared a home in heaven for us all, and
ministers would tell the members of their congregation that they need not be apprehensive. However, stern traces of Puritanism
still tinctured the religious discourse of Dickinson's young womanhood, and members of the Amherst congregation were
regularly exhorted with blood-stirring urgency to reflect upon the imminence of their own demise. Repeatedly, then, in
attempting to comprehend Dickinson's work, a reader must return to the fundamental tenets of Protestant Christianity, for her
poetry echoes the Bible more often than any other single work or author.
In part this preoccupation with the doctrines of her day reflected a more general concern with the essential questions of human
existence they addressed. In a letter to Higginson she once said, "To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other
occupations." And to her friend Mrs. Holland she wrote, "All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death?
Then tell me its name." The religious thought and language of the culture was important to her poetry because it comprised the
semiotic system that her society employed to discuss the mysteries of life and death. If she wished to contemplate these, what
other language was there to employ?
In part, however, conventional Christianityespecially the latter-day Puritanism of Dickinson's New Englandrepresented for
Dickinson an ultimate expression of patriarchal power. Rebelling against
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its rule, upbraiding a "Father" in Heaven who required absolute "faith" from his followers, but gave no discernible response,
became a way of attacking the very essence of unjust authority, especially male authority.
Of CourseI prayed
And did God Care?
He cared as much as on the Air
A Birdhad stamped her foot
And cried "Give Me"
My ReasonLife
I had not hadbut for Yourself
"Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom's Tomb
Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb
Than this smart Misery.
(Johnson 376)
The most striking feature of the verse is its attitude of indignation, a reaction to Divine indifference that hints at full-scale
revolution. Yet there is a cunning strategy of camouflage at work as well. Rebellion has been so skillfully clothed in the
cadences of a pert schoolgirl's language that unwary readers may miss the poem's complexity. The speaker is "smart" enough to
demand her rights from the omnipotent Father (although she is "smarting" from the pain of his callous behavior). What is more,
the speaker's bitter rebuke, "'Twere better Charity / To leave me in the Atoms Tomb" is but the modern reformulation of an
ancient complaint, "Let the day perish wherein I was born'' (Job 3:3), and the function of this subtle echo is to suggest that
although several millennia have passed, the pattern of Divine authority has remained fundamentally unchanged. Perhaps Milton
could believe that the consequence of tasting the fruit of knowledge was a "fortunate fall"; however, Dickinson succinctly
dismisses it as no more than "smart Misery."
It is true that the stern doctrines of New England Protestantism offered hope for a life after death; yet in Dickinson's estimation,
the trope that was used for this "salvation" revealed some of the most repellent features of God's power, for the invitation to
accept "faith" had been issued in the context of a courtship with a macabre, sexual component. It was promised that those who
had faith would be carried to Heaven by the "Bridegroom" Christ. "Blessed are they which are called
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unto the marriage supper of the Lamb" (Revelation 19:9). Nor did it escape Dickinson's notice that the perverse prurience of
Poe's notions were essentially similar to this Christian idea of Christ's "love" for a "bride" which promised a reunion that must
be "consummated'' through death. Thus the poem that is, perhaps, the apotheosis of that distinctive Dickinsonian voice, "the
speaking dead," offers an astonishing combination: this conventional promise of Christianity suffused with the tonalities of the
Gothic tradition.
Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly droveHe knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recessin the Ring
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain
We passed the Setting Sun
Or ratherHe passed Us
The Dews drew quivering and chill
For only Gossamer, my Gown
My Tippetonly Tulle . . .
Since then'tis Centuriesand yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses Heads
Were toward Eternity
(Johnson 712)
The speaker is a beautiful woman (already dead!), and like some spectral Cinderella, she is dressed to go to a ball: "For only
Gossamer, my Gown / My Tippetonly Tulle." Her escort recalls both the lover of Poe's configuration and the "Bridegroom" that
had been promised in the Bible: "We slowly droveHe knew no haste / And I had put away / My labor and my leisure too, / For
His Civility." Their "Carriage" hovers in some surrealistic state that is exterior to both time and place: they are no longer earthbound, not quite dead (or at least still pos-
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sessed of consciousness), but they have not yet achieved the celebration that awaits them, the "marriage supper of the Lamb."
Yet the ultimate implication of this work turns precisely upon the poet's capacity to explode the finite temporal boundaries that
generally define our existence, for there is a third member of the partyalso exterior to time and locationand that is "Immortality."
True immortality, the verse suggests, comes neither from the confabulations of a male lover nor from God's intangible Heaven.
Irrefutable "Immortality" resides in the work of art itself, the creation of an empowered woman poet that continues to captivate
readers more than one hundred years after her death. And this much-read, often-cited poem stands as patent proof upon the page
of its own argument!
Poe was not the only American theorist of poetry who exerted wide influence during Emily Dickinson's years of apprenticeship.
In 1844 (Dickinson's fourteenth year), Emerson had published his widely read, highly respected essay "The Poet," the essay that
would inform Whitman's construction of his own public persona"the poet, a man of the people." In many ways, Emerson's
definition of "the poet'' was also ideally suited to Dickinson, for Emerson believed that the existential commonalities of everyday
life were the most appropriate subject for poetry. "O poet!" he wrote, "a new nobility is conferred in groves and pasture, and not
in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer."
Yet Emerson's evocations of the "poet" are consistently, even relentlessly masculine:
The poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of
the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. . . .
[The poet] unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene. . . . Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take
care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
"The poet" works, then, by a sublime form of seminal effusion (for although the word "ejaculation" had a delicate ambiguity in
nineteenth-century usage, the implication of masculine sexuality was never entirely absent). "The poet need not have schooling:
he might be a farmer, a fisherman, a statesman, even an insurance salesman." Such a definition seems inclusive; Emerson
intended it to be "American." However, the one thing that he casually omitted was a feminine possibility: the notion that "the
poet" might also be a wife, a daughter, a seamstress, a
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housewife seems not to have occurred to Emerson; or if it did, he chose not to record the fact in this pronouncement.
It is not surprising that Emerson took delight in Whitman's workthat their relationship was almost one of literary father and son.
When Emerson received a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass as a gift from the author (whom he had never met), he
wrote Whitman a now-famous letter of profound appreciation: "I find incomparable things said incomparably well," he said in
part; "I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the
beginning of a great career." It is the kind of letter that most young poets only dream of receiving, an imprimatur from
America's leading man of letters. Best of all, it offered support for Whitman's radical experiments in verse and encouragement to
break new artistic ground. Whitman, well aware of its value, reprinted Emerson's letter for all the world to see in the 1856
edition of Leaves of Grass.
So far as we know, Dickinson never sent her work to Emerson for comment. She did, of course, send it to Higginson, who when
confronted by her boldly innovative verses, seems primarily to have confessed his bafflement. But then it is unlikely that anyone
would have written a letter to Dickinson like the letter Emerson wrote to Whitmanbecause she was a woman. True, there were a
few women who managed to support themselves by writing verse; however, readers and critics alike expected such women to
write predictably and certainly not to exhibit the "courage of treatment" that would produce radically new forms of verse. What
is more, there was a world of difference between making a living and embarking upon a career. Women were grudging
permitted to make a living, but the aspiration for career was thought unnatural in a female; and in the rare case when a "career"
did evolve for a woman, as it did for Lydia Sigourney, even the woman herself was inclined to become apologetic for her
success.
It is understandable, then, that Higginson could not realize that the voice in much of Dickinson's poetry was meant to be
"representative"standing "among partial [human beings] for the complete [human being]." Or that it said "incomparable things
incomparably well." Instead, like many a modern reader, he was misled by the intensely engaging illusion of personal
immediacy and urgency ("I" is the most frequently used word in her poetry)misled, perhaps, by the power of
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the verse itself. Thus with apparently some anxiety for the author's emotional welfare, after he had read only about eight of her
poems, Higginson wrote Dickinson to say that he thought she needed friends; and after he had read perhaps half a dozen more,
he evidently made such pressing inquiries about the "voice" he had encountered that the poet felt compelled to dissect her
method for him in a rather flat-footed, literal manner. "When I state myself as the Representative of the Verse," she wrote, "it
does not meanmebut a supposed person." In 1862, the notion of a "Representative" speaker alluded pointedly to Emerson.
In "The Poet," Emerson had explained what it meant to be "representative": "All men live by truth, and stand in need of
expression. . . . We study to utter our painful secret. . . . We need an interpreter. . . . [and it is 'the poet' who writes] what will
and must be spoken." Most people cannot give voice or shape to their most intimate feelings and fears, and the "Emersonian"
component of Emily Dickinson's mission as an artist set out to address this problemto say the things her readers might say if
they, too, had been given the gift of words. Dickinson's unique innovation in responding to Emerson's injunction that ''the poet"
ought to be "representative" was to write as a woman in an explicitly domestic realm, but to do so with power. It is in such an
environment, she might have argued, that the intrinsic similarities among people can best be seen. However much we may seem
to differ from each other, our most secret joys and fears are remarkably alike. Thus while in public our lives may appear very
different, one from another, in privatein the intimate recesses of the domestic worldour hopes and fears are very similar.
Paradoxically, then, a woman poet might even prove to be the best "representative man."
Dickinson is able to exploit this issue of gender in a wide variety of ways. Sometimes, the sexual identity of Dickinson's speaker
is entirely suppressedas in the hauntingly beautiful poem that begins, "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" (Johnson 216);
sometimes, as in the poem that begins "Of CourseI prayed," there is no more than an intimation of the feminine; and sometimes,
as in "Because I could not stop for Death," the speaker's feminine identity is rather fully elaborated.
However, a number of the most elegantly subtle applications of the feminine can be found in verses that do not identify the
speaker by gen-
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der, but nonetheless juxtapose imagery from an explicitly domestic world against the forces of death and decay.
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity
(Johnson 1078)
At first glance the reader might suppose the sexual identity of this speaker to be essentially immaterial and the poem's message
to be a very general one: after death, the quotidian business of life must go on.
However, this is only one part of the poem's meaning. The death of a loved one necessitates a particular kind of "Bustle in a
House," a series of tasks to be performed, generally by women. Gruesome work, like preparing the body for interment; tedious
work, like unpacking drawers and closets to apportion the belongings of a now extinguished "self": a thoughtful, melancholy
process that both recalls the past and provokes speculation about an afterlife. Thus as befits the occasion, this poem offers an
opinion about eternity; however, a reader must understand the routines of housework to appreciate it. This ''Sweeping up the
Heart" is a form of cleaning, to be sure, a domestic obligation that becomes an emotional purgative as well. The speaker's deep
insight is that this is no daily chore of dusting off and throwing out. Instead, it is seasonal work with cyclical implications, the
careful folding up and putting aside of summer or winter clothes we shall not "want to use again" until a new year has begun.
Jesus had said, "A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father"
(John 16:16); and it is this explicit promise of a reunion in heaven that the domestic imagery of the poem recollects.
Repeatedly, Emily Dickinson construes the housewife as a soldier who "mans" the front lines in our engagement with the forces
of destruction. Sometimes (as in the poem above) the ruminations of this housewife-poet are filled with hope; more often,
however, she sees herself fighting the one battle that we are all doomed, ultimately, to lose.
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All but Death, can be Adjusted
Dynasties repaired
Systemssettled in their Sockets
Citadelsdissolved
Wastes of Livesresown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs
Deathunto itselfException
Is exempt from Change
(Johnson 749)
Domestic imagery suffuses this verse in ways that seem at first to suggest a positive reading: an "adjustment" might be work for
a seamstress but it could also be a homeopathic remedy; and "repairing" minor wounds and "resetting'' dislocated joints were
both medical procedures that were generally managed without a doctor's assistance in the mid-nineteenth century. Thus by the
time we encounter the notion of "Citadels" that can be "dissolved" like sugar in water, we are apt to suppose that if only the
compassionate values of home and hearth could applied to the public world, the ills of life would be eradicated (a fond fantasy
of Victorian America).
However, this illusion is dispelled in the second stanza. Persephone-like, the speaker joins the spring in "resowing," bringing
forth new life and repairing (resewing) the fabric of human experience. Inevitably, however, all her victories will be swallowed
up in Death"itself . . . / exempt from Change."
Who sees the sly work of time more minutely or consistently than the housewife? The "Cuticle of Dust" that appears around the
drinking glass overnight, the "Borer in the Axis" of the apple. Who comprehends more circumstantially that "Crumbling is not
an instant's Act," and that "Delapidation" may happen incrementally, but that it also continues unremittingly? It is, perhaps, a
woman's particular privilege to understand that cobwebs in the parlor are but the visible sign of an ineradicable "Cobweb on the
Soul" (all quotes here are from Johnson 997).
It is not surprising, then, that many of the poems that give voice to despair most forcefully and poignantly are strung together
with this stabilizing imagery from the domestic world.
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
As if my Brain had split
I tried to match itSeam by Seam
But could not make them fit.
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The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Ballsupon a Floor.
(Johnson 937)
The unifying tropes here deal with sewing and knitting, the woman's craft of joining things together in an orderly, artful manner
and of maintaining order. These metaphors function specifically to steady the almost hysterical tone of the verse by firmly
affixing it to the tangible, reassuringly familiar processes of the home. Such an aesthetic maneuver permits Dickinson's poem to
be a coherent success, even though the speaker herself confesses failure: her story (that is, her "yarn") entirely unravels "Like
Ballsupon a Floor."
Like Frost's female speaker in "The Hill Wife," the housewife-poets in Dickinson's work understand that an insatiable
wilderness is only biding its time, impatiently waiting to retake the world. Nowhere is this stark vision more clearly articulated
than in the elegy that begins "How many times these low feet staggered." Here, the care-worn woman has laid aside her thimble
for the last time, and the voracious engines of dissolution have already begun to work: "Buzz the dull flieson the chamber
window / Braveshines the sun through the freckled pane / Fearlesssthe cobweb swings from the ceiling" (Johnson 187).
Carried to its logical conclusion, this is a vision of chaos and dissolution; however, the verses that give voice to this vision are
always masterfully crafted to be entirely coherent. Consider, for example, a poem in which Dickinson contests the age-old
theological argument "from 'Design,' " an argument claiming that the existence of a highly structured, orderly universe
necessarily implies the existence of a benevolent architect, God. The verse itself enacts the counterargument by subverting the
grammatical structures that impart order and "design" to language; its carefully modulated disjunctions, then, become a
coherently aesthetic reflection of cosmic disorder.
Four Treesupon a solitary Acre
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action
Maintain
(Johnson 742)
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This stanza mimics sentence form, but its transitive verb requires an object to be complete. Because no object is supplied, the
grammatical utterance breaks downmutilatedhaving failed to make connection. Like the Divinity.
Most often Dickinson's poetry pulls in one way or another against the various patterns that impart conventional order to
poetrysometimes strenuously. This habit of resistance, so characteristic that it even lends a distinctive visual element to the
inscription of Emily Dickinson's poems upon the page, has two origins. First, as we have seen, no one had prepared a place for a
woman poet of original geniustraditional verse forms had evolved almost exclusively for a male voiceand those men of letters
whose constructions of "The Poet" dominated the American mid-nineteenth century wrote with a brazen certainty that this poet
would be a he, a certainty so deep it did not require defense. Inevitably, then, if a woman wished to write "incomparably well,"
to have that "courage of treatment" for which Emerson praised Whitman, she was constrained to fly in the face of convention.
Second, Emily Dickinson espoused an openly rebellious attitude toward God and toward the various forms of male authority that
He epitomized as "Burglar! BankerFather!" (Johnson 49). Discovering aesthetically effective strategies to ''break the rules" was
her poetic mode of defying this authorityan intrinsic expression of both power and play, and a deeply satisfying way to assert
her own unassailable autonomy.
Consider something so apparently trivial as Dickinson's habit of employing dashes instead of other, more usual marks of
punctuation. For generations there have been readers who want to discover a "grand scheme" that can decode the unruly verse
and subdue it to regulation, and it is just such rule-bound limitation that Dickinson is seeking to elude. Thus her dashes
consistently subvert the tidy logical relationships that commas and semicolons and the like would impose. The subversion is
generally gentle (and exquisitely modulated); it never makes the verse incoherent. Instead, it is just jarring enough to keep the
reader unsettled. Sometimes the dashes do little more than control the pace of a poem. For example:
Thisis the landthe Sunset washes
Theseare the Banks of the Yellow Sea
(Johnson 266)
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The underlying metaphor of a boat upon rolling water is affirmed here by dashes, which make the verse seem to rock back and
forth.
Sometimes, however, Dickinson makes much more profound use of this device as in the poem that begins "I felt a Funeral, in
my Brain." This verse gives an excruciating account of the experience of death; its speaker is pulled forward irresistably toward
some ultimate unknown; and the force of time, which moves the speaker inescapably toward this confrontation, is given
grammatical representation by a thumping, accelerating use of parataxisone thing after another in dreadful progressionAnd . . .
And . . . And." Yet the conclusion of the verse is suspended in superb uncertainty, and it is a masterful manipulation of dashes
in the last line that makes the superb uncertainty of this conclusion possible. "And I dropped down, and down / And hit a
World, at every plunge, / And Finished knowingthen" (Johnson 280). "Then" what? Is "then'' a finality: "And finished knowing
then."? Or is "then" merely an unfinished transition to some unknowable state of consciousness: "And finished knowing. Then .
. ."? It is disturbing not to know. It is meant to be.
Even more unsettling than her use of dashes, however, is Dickinson's capacity to exploit the many ontological properties of
language. In On the Margins of Discourse Barbara Herrnstein Smith has written about the representational possibilities of
words themselves and thus of literary texts.
As a general class, literary artworks may be conceived of as depictions or representations, rather than instances, of natural
discourse. . . . Thus lyric poems typically represent personal utterances, or, to use Goodman's picturesquely unidiomatic
terms, such poems are pictures of utterance.
In any given lyric poem, then, any given word may do at least two things simultaneously: it may have a referential function,
pointing mimetically toward some supposed object; at the same time, it may become an object itselfa single sign that constitutes
an aesthetic configuration or a puzzle in miniature. Consider the following particular example. The poet begins:
All I may, if small,
Do it not display
Larger for the Totalness
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'Tis Economy
To Bestow a World
And withhold a Star
Utmost, is Munificence
Less, tho larger, poor.
(Johnson 819)
The first-level meaning of this poem asserts that despite the speaker's meager resources, she is willing to give everything; she
then inquires whether everything (even if it is not very much) does not constitute a rather great sacrifice. When the second level
is consideredthat is, when the words are taken as objects in themselveshe configuration of the inscription becomes an impish
word game, a paradox that affirms the first meaning while asserting the speaker's ultimate and uniquely unimpeachable power as
poet. The coup turns upon the fact that the word "small" contains the word "all."
God, Who has everything in the real world of referential words and palpable objects, has given a great deal; however, He has
also withheld a great deal, and so He still retains much. In the real world of referential words and palpable objects, the speaker
has very little, and if she gives "all" away, she will have nothing left. However, in the "inscribed" reality of this lyric poem, the
artist has created a context in which a paradox can exist. Dickinson has constructed a speaker who is "small," and who gives
everything; nonetheless, the same speaker will also continue to retain everything, for the word small will continue to contain all
so long as language exists. Moreover, the bold paradox will remain audaciously alive so long as the inscription of the verse
remains to be read.
There are certain words whose inscribed properties were especially appealing to Dickinson: small/all is a frequent location for
linguistic games; eye/I (and every word with a long I sound) was a multifaceted pun that Dickinson employed to assert "self."
The word "noon" was replete with possibility: it is "no" face-to-face; it is a palindrome of a word, the same whether read
forwards or backwards; it is a word with "nothing'' in it (actually "twice nothing," two zeroes); yet it might be construed as a
word with infinity in it ( ). Clearly, much of the immensely unsettling power of Dickinson's verse derives from her skill in
juggling these ontological possibilities and from her habit of exploiting the many possibilities for meaning in the words she
employed. Thus
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if lyric poems can "represent personal utterances," Dickinson forces her reader into a constant state of uncertainty about whether
it is the "representational" component of individual words themselves that is in play or the capacity of language to mimic
"personal utterances" by naming things in the real world.
It is not surprising, then, that so many readers have found Emily Dickinson's poetry "difficult" or "cryptic." Literally, it is
cryptic: it is full of internal puzzles. What is more, it is an assertion of aesthetic power, a form of linguistic competition.
Confronted with such extraordinary intelligence, such sophistication, such talent, such audacitywhat reader would not want to
know more about "Emily Dickinson" of Amherst? And since genius is always surprising (and genius that flourishes in solitude
is doubly surprising), it is no wonder, perhaps, that readers are not altogether prepared to credit Dickinson's self-consciousness,
and that we are inclined instead to cling to outlandish notions of spontaneous writing. Finally, since many of Dickinson's poetic
inventions are tinged with anger and an air of challengesince they do leave a reader unsettled and unnerved, and since they are
often meant to do just thatit is not in the least surprising that readers and scholars have had a powerfully defensive reaction to
them. Thus they construct an "Emily Dickinson" whose difficulties are the manifestation of some infirmity or impairment: "The
Poet" was sick or suffering from emotional distress; therefore, her verse is hysterical and occasionally unfathomable. If we can't
understand Dickinson's work, it is her problem.
All of this is understandable; however, it robs us of the best gift of all: the range and complexity of the poetry itself. If we are to
have "Emily Dickinson" at all, perhaps we must take her entirely on her own terms:
I reckonwhen I count at all
FirstPoetsThen the Sun
(Johnson 569)
The poetry was all she left; it appears to be all she wished to leave.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff
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Further Reading
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.
The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Ralph Franklin. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press,
1981.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951, 1955.
Eberwein, Jane Donahue. Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. Amherst: University of Massachuetts Press, 1985.
Loeffelholz, Mary. Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Pollack, Vivian. Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. New York: Knopf, 1986.
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Walt Whitman's Revisionary Democracy
Walt Whitman has emerged, over time and through successive generations of criticism, as the central poet of our literature.
Indeed, American poetry may be read as a series of reactions to Whitman, typified by Ezra Pound in his poem "A Pact"
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman
I have detested you long enough,
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was Whitman, Pound says, who "broke the new wood." And indeed, Whitman wrote a kind of poetry like nothing under the
sun, and he left behind in Leaves of Grassthe title he gave to his collected poemsa body of work that we may never fully absorb.
The originality of Whitman's literary accomplishment contrasts sharply with the modesty of his origins. Walt Whitman was born
in the farm community of West Hills, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, the second eldest of Louisa Van Velsor's and Walter
Whitman's eight surviving children. His ancestors included Dutch and Quaker farmers who had settled in the Long Island
countryside. Whitman's idyllic childhood there was disrupted during the 1823 real estate boom when the family moved to
Brooklyn and his father began a second career in building and selling houses. Although he boasted of his progressive stance on
political matters and numbered Tom Paine among his
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acquaintances, Whitman's father was a short-tempered, tight-fisted man who played the petty tyrant at home and quarreled
frequently with his literary son. Whitman consequently looked to his mother for affection. But his fondest memory of those
early years was not concerned with either parent but with General Lafayette's visit to Brooklyn. In a greeting that would become
significant for Whitman's later understanding of his poetic vocation, the aged hero from the Revolutionary era traversed the
barrier separating the generations and, lifting the five-year-old Whitman from out of a Brooklyn crowd, embraced him.
Whitman attended Brooklyn public schools for six years, beginning about 1825, although he ended his formal education at the
age of eleven to become an office boy in a law firm. Whitman's reading projects during this period included Walter Scott's
romances, the writings of Count Volney, Robert Dale Owen, Frances Wright, and Thomas Paine, all collected in his father's
library. Whitman's adolescent years were also distinctive for the variety of his employments. At twelve, he wrote sentimental
fillers for the Long Island Patriot, a weekly whose editor shared the political views of Whitman's father. After the family moved
back to West Hills in 1834, Whitman stayed in Brooklyn, published pieces for the New York Mirror, and began the training as a
journeyman printer he would complete in 1835. After the two great fires of 1835 crippled the printing industry, Whitman
rejoined his family, now in Hempstead, Long Island, and for the next five years, alternated teaching in small-town schools with
printing for local newspapers. In the wake of a well-publicized controversy over his unorthodox teaching methods, Whitman
initiated a series of other interests. He began his own newspaper, the weekly Long Islander, in 1838, and became active that
year as well in local debating societies, reading groups, and political organizations. In early 1840 he started work on a highly
conventional series of poetic sketches he published in the Long Island Democrat.
Between 1842 and 1845 the New York printing industry enjoyed something of a renaissance with forty more newspapers
entering the marketplace. In 1842 Whitman became editor of the New York Aurora, and over the next twelve years he
developed a political rhetoric compatible with the publishing market's demands.
Eighteen forty-two was a significant year for Whitman's later development. In March he heard Emerson deliver a lecture on
poetry in
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Manhattan that included a passage that Whitman would later invoke as his poetic credo:
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, "Those who are free
throughout the world." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by
stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of
any value in books excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is enflamed and carried away by his thought .
. . let me read his paper and you may have all the arguments and history and criticism.
After hearing Emerson on poetry, Whitman aspired to remake himself in Emerson's image of the poet. But the poetry he
produced in that year was slack, and predictably sentimental, lacking the promise of Leaves of Grass. His deepest intuitions were
not recorded in a poem but derived from his reflections on the consequences of an editorial he wrote for the Aurora on April 12,
1842, when the resentment he had directed against the Irish Catholics resulted in a "no-popery" mob attacking St. Patrick's
Cathedral. In the retraction he prepared for the next day's edition, Whitman expressed resolves that would later become part of
the 1855 preface. "We go for the largest libertythe widest extension of the immunities of the people, as well as the blessings of
our government."
After the editor of the Aurora fired him in mid-May for what he referred to as Whitman's "laziness," within the year Whitman
became, in rapid succession, the editor of a rival daily, the Evening Tatler, the author of a temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or
the Inebriate, and the regular contributor of poetry and short fiction to such literary periodicals as the Democratic Review,
Aristidean, American Review, New Mirror, and Rover. Over the next eight years, Whitman wrote theater columns, book reviews,
and political editorials for a number of newspapers, including the prestigious Brooklyn Daily Eagle. During this period,
Whitman's political views were comparably volatile. When he began writing for the Eagle, Whitman endorsed the expansionist
views of the paper's owner, Isaac Van Anden. But by 1848 Whitman had become a Free Soil Democrat, opposed to the
annexation of more slave territory. Following the publication, on January 3, 1848, of an editorial in which he expressed these
views, Van Anden fired Whitman. This event proved once again fortuitous for the opportunity it afforded Whitman to travel to
New Orleans on the first of the two prolonged
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trips away from New York in his lifetime. The editorial position he secured for himself at the New Orleans Daily Crescent
lasted from March 5 until May 25, when arguments with that paper's owners led to the termination of Whitman's services.
Whitman returned to New York by way of the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, and the Hudson River. But his visit to the South
had not changed his opposition to slavery. In 1848 he became the founding editor of a Free Soil paper, the Freeman, in whose
editorial pages he was preoccupied with a troubling political contradiction. Because Whitman believed in the free labor of the
working men and women of Brooklyn, he was persuaded for a short time that abolitionism, in its opposition to Negro slavery,
indirectly justified wage slavery. Opposed to slavery in every form, Whitman now believed that partisan politics had
compromised the principle of liberty.
Over the next five years he wrote experimental poetry; became a delegate to the Buffalo Free Soil Convention; attended plays
and operas; learned carpentry; spoke at political rallies; began a regimen in self-education including readings in world-religions,
natural history, Emerson, and Egyptology; cultivated friendships in the Brooklyn artists' as well as Manhattan laborers'
communities; and declaimed verses from Homer, Shakespeare, and the Bible along deserted stretches of Coney Island beaches.
Gay Wilson Allen has described this "long foreground" prior to the publication of Leaves of Grass succinctly.
The most important period in the life of Walt Whitman, the poet, was the years between 1850 and 1855. Outwardly it was
undramatic and judged in terms of worldly success it was a failure. But intellectually and spiritually these were the most
exciting and adventurous years that Whitman had experienced, for during this half-decade he wrote and printed the first
edition of his Leaves of Grass and thereby created a new epoch not only in American but also in world literature.
Affording no indication of that epoch-making literary event, Whitman's previous occupations were nevertheless the basis for the
wide range of his metaphors and his inclusive sense of audience. The self of which Whitman sang in the volume's central
poem"Song of Myself"derived characteristics from the full itinerary of his personaeteacher, editor, dandy, stroller, ward leader,
compositor, delegate, orator, carpenter, politician, house-builder. It emerged as a composite and adhesive rather than exclusive
identity.
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Indeed the entire volume, whose preface was comprised of a collage of passages from the newspaper editorials he had written
over the preceding fifteen years, might be described as a compendium of the lessons Whitman had learned in his other
vocations. The theater had taught him to understand writing as a performance before an audience learning how to respond. From
the printer Whitman had discovered that words on the page should be construed as if as changeable as the readers to whom they
were addressed; from the mass daily the value of a public medium available to everyday events; from Emerson how to immerse
daily events in a transcendental mood; from the politician social responsibility; from the poet absolute responsiveness; from the
carpenter pride in work; from General Lafayette the value of a transhistorical salutation; from the stroller how to become
absorbed in passing scenes; from the orator how to absorb the interest of others.
Whitman's connections in the printing trade facilitated the publication of Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855, when James and
Thomas Rome requested Whitman's assistance in setting type for the eighty-five pages of poetry and ten of prose, bound in the
slim, handsome green cloth folio with gold leaf ornament. Before his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman would see Leaves of
Grass through eight other editions, with material added and deleted to suit the needs of the times.
The contradictory features represented in the portrait of Walt Whitman that accompanied the 1855 volume of Leaves of Grass
made it clear the poems were not addressed solely to a literary clientele but to working-class men and women. Through this
literary reflection of their image Whitman encouraged understanding of the working class's participation in the national
experiment as his poetry's true subject. Outfitted in clothes of the laboring class, Whitman projected a figure whose
bearingbearded, unbuttoned, relaxed, looking directly at the readerderived from the poetry. On page 29 of the quarto that portrait
was identified as "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly, fleshy and sensual . . . eating, drinking
and breeding, No sentimentalist . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them." In quite literally embodying poetry's
value for working men and women, Whitman hoped to animate their desire to read his book of poems as if it were necessary to
their continued vitality.
In his traveling back and forth between two separate groups of friendsthe bohemian artist and the working-class communities
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Whitman silently aspired to mediate between these factions. He wanted to make it manifest in his poetry that literature was as
interested in the working class as they should be in it. As enjambed lines in "Song of Myself" brought representatives of the
working-class elbow to elbow with the literary elite, Whitman introduced the two groups to one another and invited both to
envision their lives as improvised out of a common submerged self. In 1855 the fear of impending civil war heightened
awareness of social factions and aroused his anxiety over what might be called a salutation scarcity. Whitman's premonition that
political divisiveness would result in the failure to return greetings inspired him to understand Leaves of Grass as a prolonged
salutation to the United States reading public. That greeting is proffered most famously in "I celebrate myself and sing myself
and what I assume you shall assume." But Whitman indicates the intended vast range of social acknowledgment in the following
lines from "Song of the Answerer":
He says indifferently and alike, How are you my friend? to the President at his levee,
And he says Good-day my brother, to Cudge that hoes in the sugar field;
And both understand him and know that his speech is right.
As had Lafayette for him, Whitman provided his readers with the spectacle of a citizen who greeted the United States as if it
were his own invention. A question from the 1855 preface, "Does this acknowledge liberty with audible and absolute
acknowledgement?" assigns a political function to this expansive speech act. The audible manifestation of absolute
acknowledgement, a return of greeting, realizes liberty and thereby renders an individual's demand for freedom commensurate
with the more inclusive social demand for equality.
In its status as a permanent salutation Whitman's poetry responded to the more general social anxiety over the break-up of the
Union he expressed in the 1855 preface. The relation between the poetry and the 1855 preface possesses consequently the
structure of a fulfilled wish. Because the central political terms, "liberty," "equality," "absolute acknowledgement," recorded in
the prose preface were provocative rather than descriptive and lacked referents in Europe's political history, Whitman aspired to
construct "democratic vistas" for these incitements to a shared political life, spaces wherein these unprecedented political terms
might acquire social value.
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In declaring "The United States are themselves the greatest poem," Whitman associated the cultivation of adequate
responsiveness to his poetry with a political education in how to actualize the nation's founding terms.
Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the great poet is the
equable man. . . . Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its
fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and
land.
Understood as the "greatest poem," however, the United States realized wishes that were not homegrown but originated with
European desires for political betterment and social renewal. Whitman became the "equalizer of his age and land" because he
indicated how the United States' geography was constructed out of Europe's hope for a better world. When re-viewed in the light
of Leaves of Grass, the United States emerged as Europe's afterlife. The land Americans already have, Whitman concludes, is
the one Europeans once wanted.
America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the ideas of castes or the
old religions . . . is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature
while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms.
Whitman's assertion in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass that the poet rather than the president was the nation's "common
referee" responded as well to political aspirations much closer to home. In naming three of Whitman's brothersAndrew Jackson,
Thomas Jefferson, and George Washingtonafter United States presidents, Whitman's father had conflated patriotic with paternal
sentiments. In his verse Whitman extended into the national community the role he played as mediator between his brothers and
their parents. Following the death of his father shortly after the publication of Leaves of Grass, on July 11, 1855, the roles of
national bard and substitute parent merged.
As I argued in Visionary Compacts, the "Children of Adam" sequence he would add to the 1860 edition expanded Whitman's
kinship group to include the entire U.S. population, past and future, women and men "en-masse," and he identified what he
called the "body electric" as the democratic equivalent of what European monarchs called the "king's
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second body.'' In associating the properties of permanence, immutability, and transferability with the office rather than the body
of the monarch, the king's second body rendered the institution immortal. In proposing the "body electric" as the political
instrument ensuring the nation against the death of democracy, Whitman borrowed metaphors from physics to explain its
dynamics. Once switched on the body electric rendered kinetic the individual's "potential" for multiple associations, thereby
enabling each citizen's access to a network of associations. As with his other political fictions, Whitman's Leaves of Grass
became the experimental field upon which he demonstrated the possible social effect of the poetic construct.
When placed in that field of force the "body electric" replaced carefully parsed sentences with speech floods: streams of words
capable of immersing individual parts of speech in a more inclusive linguistic process. As these powerful flows built up
momentum they induced the individual parts of speech in Whitman's sentences to discharge their individual differences into
energies capable of attracting other syntactic units. Listen to the linguistic energies in the following passage as they materialize
democracy's "body electric":
The pure contralto sings in the organloft,
The carpenter dresses his plank . . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordained with crossedhands at the altar,
The spinning girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel
("Song of Myself")
The separate phrases in this prolonged sentence do not represent but associate individuals. They draw single, separate persons,
otherwise silently passing each other by, into a larger social movement. As these persons and the parts of speech with which
they are associated gather mass, they do not remain separated. The kinetic energy flooding through successive social figure
binds them together. As it transmutes individual potential into this social motion, the passage spills out a multiplicity of possible
selves, involving each individual in a more inclusive
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identity. Whitman believed this model of democratic kinship necessary to supplant Europe's ancestral lineages. In place of
successive generations of blood relatives, the individuals associated in this passage undergo instantaneous evolution. Each figure
finds in the ensemble a revelation of the possible materializations of his or her own body. After each figure understands these
other shapes as potential ancestors and descendants, Whitman declares representatively for the body electric: "There was never
more inception than there is now. Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than
there is now" ("Song of Myself").
In catalogues like this one gathering masses do not impede the development of individual citizens but accelerate their
"evolution." Unlike geneticists, who understood this process as the result of thousands of years of evolution, Whitman believed
each individual needed only to "merge in the general run [of a social movement] and await his development." Represented as
involved in each other's evolution, every member of the body electric becomes kin. What differentiates this mass demonstration
from related family gatherings, however, is the "equality'' Whitman assigns to each "developing" figure. Whereas Whitman does
not call attention to the differences among individuals, he nevertheless indicates their necessity for the development of all
humankind. Because each individual contributes to this collective biological process, no single individual, when construed from
the perspective of the inclusive process, can be described as superior or inferior. What Whitman calls the "perfection" of the
human form depends equally upon each of the parts materializing that perfection. When Whitman asserted that "there will never
be any more perfection than there is now," he referred to the full run of the human form represented in this passage for a gloss.
The "human catalogues" in the poetry thereby proved Whitman's belief in the democratic masses' power to develop potentialities
for humankind that he had recorded in the prose preface:
To these [the masses] respond perfections not only in the committees that were supposed to stand for the rest but in the
rest themselves just the same. These understand the law of perfection in masses and floods . . . that its finish is to each for
itself and onward from itself . . . that it is profuse and impartial.
In thereby correlating poetic innovations with such political doctrines as the "man en-masse," "social ensemble," and the "body
electric,"
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Whitman insisted on their interdependence. Other formal experiments such as the abandonment of uniform stanzaic patterns and
the virtual elimination of rhyme lacked immediate social referents. While the repetition of lines and phrases resembled the
"thought rhythm" of the King James Bible, Whitman's elevation of the verse line into the basic rhythmical unit constituted a
purely formal innovation. In disregarding meter altogether Whitman originated a form of free verse without precedent in literary
history.
Whitman claimed that his variable musical effects were influenced most profoundly by the aria and recitative passages, what he
called the superb "vocalism" of the Italian opera. Because Whitman understood it to be a poetic faculty lying dormant within
each of his readers, he recommended particular exercises for their cultivation of vocal range:
What vocalism most needs in these States, not only in the few choicer words and phrases, but in our whole talk, is ease,
sonorous strength, breadth and openness. Boys and girls should practice daily in free, loud readingin the open air, if
possible [ . . . ] let your organ swell loudly without screamingdon't specify each syllable or word, but let them flowfeel the
sentiment of what you read or say, and follow where it leads.
Whitman proposed the following lines from the 1855 "Song of Myself" as a sample of how to practice this advice:
A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.
I hear the trained soprano . . . she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies.
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast.
Whitman did not confine his demonstration of such unheard-of vocal power to individual lines but extended it to include the
entirety of Leaves of Grass. As the soprano's aria had exalted Whitman, so would Whitman exalt those readers whose identities
were to be understood subsequently as in need of Whitman's poetry. As their interlocutor Whitman addressed the "answerer" in
each of his readers. But he did not intend as a consequence of this conversation that his readers identify with any single
argumentative position or social doctrine. If we understand notions such as the "body electric" as resources for improvisation
rather than fixed doctrines, it is clear Whitman never in fact recom-
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mended any specific doctrines to his readers. He "embodied" instead the energetic exchanges, the give-and-take productive of
them. Had he espoused specific political or religious doctrines Whitman would have affirmed a separate rather than electric
identity and a foundationalist rather than pragmatic attitude. To promote the latter Whitman invented for himself a malleable
position within what he called an everchanging "colloquy" with his readers. Reducible neither to self nor to other and not
exactly the equivalent of intersubjectivity, what we might call Whitman's intersubject resulted in a never ending conversation.
I have discussed Whitman's theory of poetry in "Poetics of Pure Possibility," from which the following observations are drawn.
When Whitman declares, in "Song of Myself," "And what I assume, you shall assume,'' the "you" does not refer to a reader with
an identity entirely separable from the activity of reading the poem: the "you" is instead virtually anticipated by the speaker
before he can speak a word. Or, as Whitman puts it, in "A Song of the Rolling Earth," "those are not the words, the substantial
words . . . they are in you." Throughout Whitman's poetry the reader's "you" supplements "I" as the "latency" remaining
unspoken in every utterance. Consequently, neither "I" nor "you" alone can be said to constitute the speaking voice, but only the
profound relation between them that the poetry animates. When impersonated by this resonant voice the speaker represented in
the poetry alternately anticipates a reader's responses yet changes places with the reader, producing a voice that by turns
questions, exhorts, commands, swears, soothes, deceives, screams, cozens, doubts, echoes, recriminates, and often downright
gabs. Whitman explains the resultant fusion of voices succinctly in "Song of Myself": "It is you talking just as much as myself, I
act as the tongue of you, / Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd." By alternately impersonating both sides of an
implicit dialogue, then, Whitman's voice undergoes constant modulations, startling enough in their effects to be his voice's
equivalent of the transformative power of metaphor.
The power of this modulation, however, can be attributed neither to the speaker nor to the "answerer" but only to the voice
resulting from their fusion. From their voices, there "proceeds another eternally curious of the harmony of things" (preface to the
1855 edition of Leaves of Grass). Depending upon the intensity of its register, Whitman describes the sound of this fusing voice
variously as a "hum," "lull,"
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"drift," and even "a barbaric yawp," and he claims to prefer this sound, which we could call the unspoken resonance of his
words, to the individual words themselves: "The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything" (''Shut Not Your Doors").
As the outward form of the invisible and "unlaunch'd" poem that can never be written or confirmed into print, the printed words
reveal only the "shreds" or the "debris" of an inexpressible, ever-elusive power of vocality, the "barbaric yawp" that precedes yet
underwrites audible voices. Whitman's poems do not propose themselves to be images or a precise rendition of emotions but the
confluence of "dumb voices." Like echoes that sink into consciousness in the silences between speech, the resultant "lulls" are
less sounds in themselves than resoundings of already spoken words that paradoxically precede individual utterances and resound through them.
To actualize such an interlocutive voice Whitman developed various innovations in poetic form. He abandoned the passive and
active voice for one in an intransitive mood and capable of declaring, "I sing myself and celebrate myself." In this singular
construction the "I" refers to an agent neither totally separated from its activity of singing, as it would be in the active voice, nor
wholly acted upon, as it would in the passive. Whitman's "I" occupies what linguists call the middle voice, by which they refer
to a verbal performance whose speaker is inside the process of which he presumes to be the agent, who effects something that is
simultaneously effected in him.
Since Whitman's persona is different with each new poem, it cannot be ascribed to the empirical identity, Walt Whitman. The
sheer intensity of the songs transfigures Whitman's empirical ego into what he calls in "That Shadow, My Likeness" a "likeness"
of his true self, capable of appearing only within the interlocutive process effected in "caroling these songs."
That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering.
How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits,
How often I question and doubt whether that is really me,
But among my lovers and caroling these songs,
I never doubt whether that is really me.
("That Shadow My Likeness")
The correlation the speaker adduces between caroling and being among lovers is a topic I shall take up shortly. For now it is
important to real-
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ize that when Whitman wrote "I sing myself" he literally meant that his singing brought a self into being.
Put starkly Whitman believed he had turned himself into the consciousness of singingbut a consciousness of a peculiar kind.
Since Whitman's voice engenders the confluence of self and other, it partakes of all the sensual delight inherent in such fusion.
When Whitman incarnates the voice of interlocution, it is not as a disembodied voice but as a "body electric," covered with
"instant conductors all over"not merely a speaking voice but a fully sensualized, listening, smelling, seeing, tasting, touching
one, longing for renewed relations with others. Perhaps, since only the sexual urge approaches the intensity of the consequent
desire for union, in passages such as this one Whitman uses sexuality as the appropriate metaphor for that desire.
I believe in you my soul . . . . the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass . . . . loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . . not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart,
and reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . . and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.
In these lines Whitman's self becomes intercorporeal with that of the "you"each self experiencing itself as the interiority of the
other. Both the sexual and interlocutive selves can here be said to incarnate a give-
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and-take intense enough to render the giver indistinguishable from the taker. That is to say, the sexual self, like Whitman's
intersubject, incarnates the fusing relation between persons rather than any individual identity. Consequently, when Whitman
speaks from out of that "body electric," he treats all his relationships in the world as ones in which he touchingly ventures "the
verge of myself, then the outlet again."
But sexuality indicates only one of Whitman's metaphors for the intersubjects. Through an even more telling strategy, the "I"and
this is especially true when it is associated with multiple predicationsseems surrounded, even spoken, by natural processes.
If I worship any particular thing it shall be some of the spread of my body;
Translucent mould of me it shall be you,
Shaded ledges and rests, firm masculine coulter, it shall be you,
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you,
You my rich blood, your milky stream pale strippings of my life;
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you,
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions,
Root of washed sweet-flag, timorous pond-snipe, nest of guarded duplicate eggs, it shall be you,
Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn it shall be you,
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you;
Sun so generous it shall be you,
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you,
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you,
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you,
Broad muscular fields, branches of liveoak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you,
Hands I have taken, face I have kissed, mortal I have ever touched it shall be you.
While the subject in these lines is immersed in such confluent activities it does not dominate, but as if it is itself no less fluid the
"I" merges with them. In Leaves of Grass Whitman not only liquefies himself but manages to melt and occasionally evaporate
the most resistant objects into a merging flow. This observation supplies still another key for understanding Whitman's famous
catalogue constructions, for in these, too, objective scenes surround Whitman, but without any one scene assuming visual
priority, and without the group disarticulated to a sequence of scenes. These resonate, flowing into, even echoing one another,
dis-
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place the priority of the gaze, and render themselves finally indistinguishable from spoken words. Through this remarkable
technique Whitman effects a profound confusion of the senses, for in the catalogues he manages so to intertwine the acts of
speaking and seeing that he seems to speak seeing.
As the "similitudes" of the interlocutive voice designating in Whitman's verse the original relation for all creation, the speaker,
reader, and individual poemsin fact, all of the subjects and all objects of Leaves of Grassflow into the "hum" of a "valvéd
voice.'' Throughout the poetry Whitman's "I" as "you" partakes of the rapid transformation of this unspoken voice, until the
speaker evaporates into its unspeakably thin air, "I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in
eddies and drift it in lacy jags."
Despite Whitman's spectacular expectations, the public response to Leaves of Grass was initially mixed. The most adulatory
reviews were written by Whitman himself and published anonymously in the United States Review and the Brooklyn Daily
Times. In his review for Putnam's Monthly Charles Eliot Norton described Leaves of Grass as a "curious and lawless collection
of poems . . . neither in rhyme or in blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure
or regularity." But after reading the complimentary volume Whitman had sent him in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson
responded with an enthusiasm seemingly greater than Whitman's. "I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of
Grass," Emerson began his letter of July 21, 1855. He continued, "I find it the most extraordinary piece of art and wisdom that
America has yet contributed."
The section of the letter on which Whitman focused his attention began with the sentence "I greet you at the beginning of a
great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start." By way of this sentence Emerson,
speaking for himself, returned the greeting Whitman had extended to the universe, thereby acknowledging Whitman's poetic
achievement. Whereas Emerson sent this as a private letter, Whitman, without asking Emerson's permission, turned it into a
public advertisement. He had copies of the letter printed up, then bound them up in copies of Leaves of Grass he sent to
prominent authors and book review editors. In October he let Horace Greeley publish the letter in his Tribune, and stamped "I
Greet You at
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the Beginning of A Great Career, R.W. Emerson" in gold print on the spine of the 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass.
The usage to which Whitman put Emerson's private letter is significant as an indication of his public persona. In the lecture on
the poet Whitman heard in 1842 Emerson had called for an American bard. In "Song of Myself" Whitman announced himself as
the incarnation of that persona, and in Emerson's letter he found confirmation in that identity.
What Emerson's lecture had not called for, however, was Whitman's intense and explicit account of sexuality. The 1856 edition
included his response to Emerson's letter, which outlined their differences of opinion and included the following rationale for his
celebration of sexuality:
Infidelism usurps most with foetid, polite face, among the rest infidelism about sex. By silence or obedience to the pens
of savans, poets, historians, biographers, and the rest, have long connived at the filthy law, and books enslaved to it, that
what makes the manhood of a man, that sex, womanhood, maternity, desires, lusty animations, organs, acts, are
unmentionable and to be ashamed of, to be driven to skulk out of literature with whatever belongs to them. This filthy law
has to be repealedit stands in the way of great reforms. Of women just as much as men, it is the interest that there should
not be infidelism about sex, but perfect faith. Women in These States approach the day of that organic equality with man,
without which, I see, men cannot have organic equality among themselves. . . . I say that the body of a man or woman,
the main matter is so far quite unexpressed in poems; but that the body is to be expressed, and sex is. Of bards for These
States, if it come to a question, it is whether they shall celebrate in poems the eternal decency of the amativeness of
Nature, the motherhood of all, or whether they shall be the bards of the fashionable delusion of the inherent nastiness of
sex; and of the feeble and querulous modesty of deprivation.
Emerson's letter and Whitman's response replaced the 1855 preface in a second edition whose central theme became the
exaltation of America's spiritual and physical progress. Despite Emerson's pleas in the 1860 edition, Whitman did not delete but
elaborated his celebration of sexuality into the "Enfants d'Adam" (later called "Children of Adam") and "Calamus'' sequences
(unabashedly erotic poems of loving comradeship between men). In so doing, Whitman made clear his intention, not to give up,
but to pursue his differences with Emerson on
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the matter of sexuality into new poems and new contexts throughout the remainder of his career.
In his exchange of letters with Emerson Whitman proposed the celebration of sexuality as a release of the blockages impeding
democratic processes. In urging acceptance of suppressed bodily urges Whitman intended to restore health to the body politic.
But these themes had application as well to Whitman's own family experience. Whitman's politically progressive father was
notoriously repressive about sexual matters. This attitude had disastrous consequences for several members of Whitman's family:
his older brother, Jessie, the victim of tertiary syphilis, was committed to an insane asylum; Andrew married a prostitute who
neglected their children after he died of tuberculosis during the Civil War; Edward was born feebleminded; his sister Hannah
suffered from sexual frustration throughout her marriage; his sister Mary endured decades of physical and mental abuse from
her alcoholic husband, Ansel Van Nostrand.
Perhaps it was partly to free himself from this constrictive family narrative that Whitman inaugurated a program of unrestrained
sexual gratification. But the "Calamus" poems also presented Whitman with an opportunity to exempt his father posthumously
from guilt over his children's failures, and to discriminate his imaginative allegiance with Emerson from his bond with his
father:
I throw myself upon your breast my father,
I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,
I hold you so firm, till you answer me something.
Kiss me, my father,
Touch me with your lips, as I touch those I love,
Breathe to me, while I hold you close, the secret of the wondrous murmuring I envy,
For I fear I shall become crazed if I cannot emulate it, and utter myself as well as it.
In a highly persuasive reading of these lines from the 1860 edition Harold Bloom explains how their homoerotic theme enabled
Whitman to separate himself from Emerson (who rejected the theme) and recover his own identity through a posthumous
extension of male comradeship to his actual father:
As the covenant with Emerson that begat the poetic self ebbs, so the rejected covenant with the actual father is accepted
and made whole. Emersonian self-
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reliance freed Whitman from the totalizing afflictions of the family romance. Now the consequences of the poetic
analogue of the family romance allowed Whitman a reconciliation he never found while his father was alive. Imaginative
loss quite literally is transformed into experiential gain.
Because repressed sexuality had replaced working-class life during this period as Whitman's representative theme, his persona
underwent a related shift. At the base of its spine, the 1860 edition portrayed a butterfly on an outstretched finger; in place of the
1855 portrait of Whitman the working-class poet, the frontispiece engraving now represented a figure, wearing a foppish
windsor tie and a sporting Byronic collar beneath a shock of wavy hair and flowing white beard. While the 1860 edition sold
better than had the previous two (John Burroughs reported that between four and five thousand were sold eventually), Thayer
and Elldredge, the publishers of the 1860 edition, went bankrupt in 1861, and Whitman, who had depended on them for his
livelihood, lost the royalties they owed him. To supplement his income he wrote a series of historical sketches about Brooklyn
for the Brooklyn Standard. Despite the relative popularity of the third edition Whitman's social standing did not improve. When
Emerson tried to make him a member of the elite Saturday Club in Boston, its other prominent members, Longfellow, Lowell,
and Holmes, all rejected him.
In the prose and poetry he wrote during this period Whitman transformed these social exclusions into indirect affirmations of the
unprecedented social order that awaited formation out of the unique resources of his prophetic poetry. Reinventing himself as if
in response to the specific needs of this period in the nation's history, Whitman became the "poet-comrade." The scenario to
which he consigned this social form entailed an imaginative erotic bond extended across the generations to readers whose
longing for Whitman's physical presence resulted from their reading the poetry:
The bards of ages hence, when you refer to me, mind not so much my poems,
Nor speak of me that I prophesied the states, and led them the way of their glories,
But come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exteriorI will tell you what to say to me:
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,
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The friend, the lover's portrait, of whom his friend, his lover, was fondest . . .
Whose happiest days were far away, through field, in woods, on hills, he and another, wandering hand in hand, they twain, apart from other men,
Who oft as he sauntered the streets, curved with his arm the shoulders of his friendwhile the arm of his friend rested upon him also.
("Recorders Ages Hence")
The "adhesiveness" binding Whitman across time to this lover took precedence over ordinary amativeness. In his homoerotic bond with such comrade
lovers, Whitman acknowledged the value of heterosexual intercourse, but as the dynamic necessary to effect the generational differences upon which
his poetry depended for its "immortality."
In 1862, however, news of an injury Whitman's younger brother, George, had sustained in the Battle of Fredericksburg led him to Washington, D.C.,
and still another change in persona. While he found that George was relatively healthy, the sight of the other wounded men, some with their limbs
amputated, others blinded or in various stages of morbidity awakened in Whitman a profound sympathy. In these young soldiers he found the loving
comrades his poetry had only envisioned. He believed their need for compassionate attention was directly addressed to the poet who had declared
agonies to be "one of my changes of garments . . . I am the man, I suffered, I was there."
Whitman stayed in Washington throughout the war, alternating writing a collection of poems that would be published in 1865 as Drum-Taps, with
writing letters, distributing reading matter, tobacco or condiments, and consoling the wounded. In becoming the "Wound Dresser" for the young men
who often depended upon him alone for comfort and community, Whitman realized the deepest urge he had suppressed in Leaves of Grass: to become
the mediator between the living and the dead. In keeping vigil as the wounded died Whitman bore witness to the central mystery of creative lifeits
double capacity to bring death to the living and life to the unborn. As the conduit for both generative and degenerative forces Whitman imagined
himself the site through which these different energies traversed and flooded into one another. In an effort to describe the regenerative figure who
emerged at this intersection, Whitman proposed an enigma: "Could we imagine such a thinglet us suggest that before a manchild or womanchild was
born it should be suggested that a human being could be born." Tenney Nathanson, in
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his excellent commentary on this enigma, pursued it into the mysterious center of Whitman's creative project. "Sexual difference
ought to be a mere accident, a secondary or surface quality," Nathanson explains, "and the undifferentiated identity it replaces
should be recoverable." Neither "manchild" nor ''womanchild," this visionary human being not yet marked by sexual difference
is apparently unaffected by that process of generation out of which it presumably emerges. Complete in itself, it seems selfsufficient and virtually self-created. The poet who achieves rebirth by announcing this presence in the poems incarnates his
visionary ambitions. During the war years the dying, whose wounds he dressed and to whose mortality he bore witness, seemed
visionary presences, apparitions in need of Whitman's poetry for the continuation of their present lives as well as the record of
their experiences.
In performing this service during the war years Whitman associated Leaves of Grass with the central nation-making event. The
war was, Whitman explained, his poetry in action. The elegies Whitman wrote following Lincoln's assassination associated his
project with the Central Man of the nation's political mythology. Deploying the images descriptive of his own beginnings from
"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," that is, the lilac bush, hermit thrush, evening star as likewise appropriate for the nation's
collective task of mourning Lincoln's death, Whitman effectively identified his own poetic taste with Lincoln's martyrdom.
Throughout "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Whitman turned Lincoln's martyrdom into a synecdoche for all the
nation's dead. When Whitman presumed the right to recollect Lincoln, whose sacrifice had secured the nation's immortality,
from within his poetry he tacitly associated Leaves of Grass with the national memory. He thereby encouraged his readers to
recollect Leaves of Grass along with the Civil War, and to understand their own lives as the renewal of both the Civil War dead
and Whitman's poetry.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
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With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep for the dead I loved so well.
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twinded with the chant of my soul
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
Partly as a result of his friend William D. O'Connor's publication of The Good Gray Poet in January of 1866, Whitman's
persona as the incarnation of the National Memory was more successful than had been the previous three. O'Connor's
hagiographical efforts on Whitman's behalf were directed against James Harlan, who, after reading the 1860 edition, had fired
Whitman from his post in the Department of the Interior. Whitman, who had a hand in the preparation of the O'Connor portrait,
was subsequently assigned to another governmental post, and over the next twenty-six years energetically engaged in remaking
himself after the image of the Good Gray Poet.
Favorable responses in Europe and the United States attended this reinvention. In February 1868 William Rossetti published his
selected edition of Poems of Walt Whitman. A. C. Swinburne compared Whitman favorably with William Blake, as did the wife
of Blake's biographer, Anne Gilchrist (who later proposed marriage). In the United States Whitman's poetry received
progressively better reviews, and Richard Bucke, the philosopher of cosmic consciousness, and John Burroughs, the naturalist,
became literary allies. Moreover, one of the fantasies he had recorded in his "Calamus" poems, of a transgenerational
homoerotic friendship, was quite literally realizedin Whitman's relationship with Peter Doyle. Whitman had first met Doyle
when serving as the "Wound Dresser" for Confederate soldiers, and remained intimate with him throughout the remainder of his
life, writing letters of parental advice as well as comradely (and erotic) affection.
In 1871 he published a philosophical essay entitled Democratic Vistas in which he further refined his understanding of
democracy, consolidating it into a philosophical stance remarkably similar to William James's and John Dewey's pragmatism.
Two years later a paralytic stroke forced him to leave Washington, D.C., and move in with his brother George in Camden, New
Jersey. His mother's death, four months later, deepened a depression from which he did not fully emerge until 1876, with the
overwhelmingly favorable public reaction
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to an article (which appeared in the January 26 edition of Camden West Jersey Press) entitled "Walt Whitman's Actual
American Position" (and probably written by Whitman himself). The essay lamented the nation's neglect of its true bard, and
following its publication in England, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Saintsbury, and Lord Houghton added their
names to the growing list of Whitman's admirers.
Whitman began publishing again in 1876 with the so-called sixth (really a reprinting of the 1871 fifth) edition of Leaves of
Grass. From 1876 until his death Whitman did all he could to consolidate his reputation. To his everlasting credit, those efforts
did not include censorship of any of his earlier views. In fact, when Whitman added "To a Common Prostitute" to the 1881
edition, the district attorney of Boston declared the edition obscene.
Throughout the last decade of the poet's life Horace Traubel helped him collect his prose and poetry in what would be called the
"deathbed edition." But most of Whitman's poems from this period concerned his difficulty in separating himself from his poetic
"fancy." In the poems he collected under the title "November Boughs," Whitman completed an identification of cosmic seasonal
cycles with Leaves of Grass and the rhythms of his own life, and thereby permanently imprinted himself as well as his poetry
within the repetitive motions of nature.
But if Whitman had trouble separating his life from his poetry; he left his readers the more difficult task of properly inheriting
the poetry. The difficulty pertains to Whitman's unprecedented claim for the timeliness of his poems, which he often described
uncannily not merely as his own past taking the place of his readers' present but of his readers' future becoming present during
Whitman's activity of writing. The following lines from "Full of Life Now" record as the first of Whitman's claims the fact that
he depends on the reading activity for continued life:
When you read these lines I that was visible am become invisible
Where it is you, compact, visible realizing my poems, seeking me.
The following lines from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" record the more astonishing claim that Whitman's poetry has transformed
his present into a bridge spanning past and future, capable of absorbing the reader's future within his past:
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It avails not, time nor placedistance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look in the river and sky, so I felt . . .
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now.
The crossing effected in these lines between the writing and reading of the poem precipitates an understanding of Whitman as at
once earlier and in need of this subsequent activity of reading to be renewed, yet also later than the reader's activity, which
consequently seems somehow anterior to Whitman's presence. "Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown
ways be looking upon you." The effect of such lines is the haunting sense that Whitman has recollected the reader from his past
and transmuted the prophetic memory at work in his poetry into the power to act upon the reader's historical presentas if it were
a suppression of Whitman's re-visionary democracy.
The resulting difficulty of adequate response was not confined to Whitman's descendants. In an essay on Whitman's work his
contemporary John Burroughs observed that
Whitman completes no poems, apart and separate from himself. . . . His lines are pulsation, thrills, waves of force,
indefinite dynamics, formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry the quality of the author's
personal presence with them in a way that is unprecedented in literature.
I have already proposed that Whitman understood his presence in the poems as indissociable from the United States' ongoing
experiment in democracy. As that process changed, Whitman reinvented his persona to answer different needs. During
Whitman's own lifetime his persona originated from the radical contradiction between the everyday lived experiences of
Brooklyn's working class and the nation's democratic ideals, and it ended up as the National Memory personified in the Good
Gray Poet. Whitman did not understand this changeable persona to be coincident with his personal biography but with the
nation's history, and he expected each generation to reinvent him out of its own needs. Writing for widely different audiences in
the 1920s, Hart Crane and Langston Hughes found in Whitman's poetry the inspiration for a renaissance. In the 1950s Allen
Ginsberg resisted the academy's efforts to suppress the sexually liberatory aspects of Whitman's poetry in the name of a
formalist agenda. More recently, such poets and critics as Marge Piercy and Michael Moon who understand U.S. nationalism as
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itself a constraint on democratic processes have discovered a Whitman answerable to the needs of the feminist and gay rights
movements. That each of these Whitmans has emerged in that permanently transitional space between an already articulated and
an as yet unrealized democracy constitutes the abiding value of Whitman's presence to a political experiment which, like the
poet, is forever undergoing dramatic revision.
Donald Pease
Further Reading
Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1955.
Anderson, Quentin. The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History. New York: Vintage, 1972.
Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Burroughs, John. Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. New York: American News, 1867.
Chase, Richard. Walt Whitman Reconsidered. New York: William Sloane, 1955.
Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Mathiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1941.
Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporealty in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992.
Nathanson, Tenney. Whitman's Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in "Leaves of Grass." New York: New York University
Press, 1992.
Pease, Donald E. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1987.
"Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility." PMLA (1981), 96:6485.
Rubin, Joseph Jay. The Historic Whitman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973.
Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
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Edgar Allan Poe
Poe (18091949), who had been orphaned and then disinherited, remained impoverished, even destitute, for most of his life. In a
confessional preface to The Raven and Other Poems (1845), his most substantial volume, he expressed his belief that serious
poetry would always be unsalable in the materialistic society of America. He explained that financial pressures had turned him
toward fiction and criticism and prevented him from pursuing a career as a professional poet. "Events not to be controlled have
prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of
my choice."
Poe was an extremely precocious poet. During his adolescence his Richmond schoolmaster Joseph Clarke had called him a born
artist who wrote genuine poetry while other boys cranked out mechanical verse. When Poe was eleven years old his foster
father, John Allan, showed Clarke a manuscript volume of his poems, which the ambitious boy wanted to have published. But
Clarke, thinking this would flatter Poe's inordinate vanity, advised against publication and the project was dropped. Poe
published three volumesin 1827, 1829, and 1831by the time he was twenty-two. He then remained comparatively silent for the
next fourteen years, and wrote only one or two major poems annually during the last three years of his life.
When Poe came to maturity William Cullen Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier were the leading American poets. He had
nothing to learn from them and turned for nourishment to the English Roman-
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tic poets. He was strongly influenced by the aesthetic theories of Coleridge, identified with the rebellious persona of Byron, and
was inspired by the epic poetry of Shelley and the lyrics of Keats.
Poe, with characteristic critical acuity, particularly admired two of his English contemporaries. He declared of Elizabeth Barrett
(who had not yet married Robert Browning), "her poetic inspiration is the highestwe can conceive nothing more august. Her
sense of Art is pure in itself." He was even more enthusiastic about the mournful lyricism, the poetical excitement, the pure
idealism, and the ethereal beauty of Alfred Tennyson. Poe revered this "magnificent genius" and exclaimed: "I consider
Tennyson not only the greatest Poet in England, at present, but the greatest one, in many senses, that England, or any other
Country, ever produced."
Poe first expressed his theory of poetry in the "Letter to B________," his first prose work, which was addressed to his publisher
Elam Bliss and included as a preface to his Poems of 1831. This "Letter" contained high praise for Coleridge, who had a
profound impact on Poe's poetic imagination, his critical principles, and his speculative mind. After praising Coleridge's mind
and learning, Poe breathlessly extolled his explosive imaginative force. "Of Coleridge I cannot speak but with reverence. His
towering intellect! his gigantic power! . . . In reading his poetry, I tremble, like one who stands upon a volcano, conscious, from
the very darkness bursting from the crater, of the fire and the light that are weltering below."
In the "Letter to B________" Poe lifted a sentence, without acknowledgment, from chapter 14 of Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria (1817). Coleridge wrote:
A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object
pleasure, not truth,
and Poe repeated:
A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Floyd Stovall, who called Coleridge "the guiding spirit of Poe's entire intellectual life," has effectively summarized his extensive
debt to the English poet. Like Coleridge, Poe believed that poetry gives pleasure by being indefinite, music is an essential
element in poetry, beauty is the
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sole province of the poem, poetic beauty has the quality of strangeness, the poem must have unity of effect, the true poem must
be brief, passion and poetry are discordant, and the tone of the poem should be melancholy.
Poe's major poetic themes include victimization, power and powerlessness, confrontations with mysterious presences, extreme
states of being, dehumanization and its cure, the relation of body and soul, memory of and mourning for the dead, the need for
spiritual transcendence and affirmation. Poe's beliefs that the dead are not entirely dead to consciousness, his hope that love
could transcend death, and his apprehension of beauty beyond the grave were inspired by the early deaths of his mother, of Jane
Stanard (the idealized mother of a school friend), and of Frances Allan (his foster mother). These three lossesin infancy,
adolescence, and young manhoodwere the most profound emotional experiences of Poe's early life. In "The Philosophy of
Composition" he expressed a crucial aesthetic principle by categorically stating, "The death of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." He particularly admired and imitated the disembodied women in
Tennyson's poems and affirmed, "He excels most in his female portraitures; but while delicate and graceful they are indefinite;
while airy and spiritual, are intangible."
Poe had been writing poems while a student at the University of Virginia and while working at his foster father's countinghouse
in 1826, and continued to do so while serving as a common soldier in 1827. He had gradually accumulated a thin manuscript,
and may have left Richmond for Boston, after quarreling with the overbearing John Allan, because it was a literary and
publishing center. His first work, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was paid for by Poe and published anonymously "By a
Bostonian." Brought out by a young printer, Calvin Thomas of 70 Washington Street, in July 1827, when Poe was only eighteen
years old, the forty-page pamphlet received no attention and fell stillborn from the press. Fifty copies were printed, of which
only twelve have survived, making it the rarest and most valuable of American first editions. In the preface Poe apologized for
the quality of his verse and magnified its merit by emphasizing his precocity. He claimed, with considerable exaggeration, that
"the greater part of the Poems which compose this little volume, were written in the year 182122, when the author had not
completed his fourteenth year." In the advertisement to
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his second volume of poetry he explained the indifferent reception of the first and suggested that malignant forces had stifled his
talent. The tire poem, Poe said, "was printed for publication in Boston, in the year 1827, but suppressed through circumstances
of a private nature."
The epigraph to Tamerlane from William Cowper's "Tirocinium"
Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm,
And make mistakes for manhood to reform
excused himself and appealed to John Allan to forgive the youthful excesses that had led to their estrangement and to Poe's
flight from home. It also began the confessional mode of many of his later poems, and employed his characteristic method of
simultaneous concealment and revelation.
The historical Tamerlane was born near Samarkand, in remote and exotic central Asia, about forty years after Kubla Khan. This
cruel Tartar warrior rose from humble origins"A cottager, I mark'd a throne / Of half the world as all my own"to become the
conqueror of Persians, Russians, Indians, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, and to create an empire that extended from the Black Sea to
the interior of Cathay. Though Tamerlane had been the subject of a play by Christopher Marlowe in 1590, Poe followed the
"oriental" tradition of exotic settings and characters made famous in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by
Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Voltaire's Zadig, Johnson's Rasselas, Beckford's Vathek, Byron's The Giaour, and Moore's Lalla
Rookh. Poe, who knew virtually nothing about the real Tamerlane but felt free to write about him, apologized for his ignorance
and begged "the reader's pardon for making Tamerlane, a Tartar of the fourteenth century, speak in the same language as a
Boston gentleman of the nineteenth; but of the Tartar mythology we have little information."
Tamerlane is meant to be an allegory of Poe's poetic ambition and disappointed love for his teenage Richmond sweetheart,
Elmira Royster. Poe's love for Elmira had, surprisingly, already been the subject of a prose sketch, "The Pirate" (1827), by his
older brother Henry, and a play, Merlin (1827), by his friend Lambert Wilmer. In Poe's poem the dying pagan conqueror
absurdly confesses to a Christian friar on his deathbed that his overweening ambition and conquest of the world have deprived
him of human love:
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How was it that Ambition crept,
Unseen amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?
In May 1829, the month after his discharge from the army, the distinguished Philadelphia publishers, Carey, Lea & Carey,
offered to bring out Poe's second volume of poetry iffollowing the current practice with unknown authorsPoe would insure them
against loss by paying one hundred dollars for the cost of publication. Poe, who of course did not have the money, appealed to
John Allan to underwrite the book and rather speciously argued that one hundred dollars "must be the limit of any loss,
supposing not a single copy of the work to be sold.It is more than probable that the work will be profitable [though Carey, Lea
& Carey did not seem to think so] & that I may gain instead of lose, even in a pecuniary way." The pragmatic Allan, though
once willing to publish Poe's schoolboy verses, knew a bad deal when he saw one. Predictably, he censured Poe's foolish request
and refused any aid.
In December 1829, after further negotiations, Poe's seventy-two page Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was finally
published in Baltimore by a less prestigious firm, Hatch & Dunning, in an edition of 250 copies. Floyd Stovall has noted that
the predominant moods of the 1827 volume as a whole are those of wounded pride and resentment for the wrongs, real or
imagined, that he had suffered, and the dominant tone of the 1829 volume is one of disillusionment with the world and
escape into some more congenial realm of dream or of the imagination.
The 264-line title poem was suffused with a fashionable Romantic melancholy and with a melodious incoherencereminiscent of
the fuzziest passages in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820)that made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to understand.
Poe's explanation did not clarify matters. He told his potential publisher, Isaac Lea, that the title of the poem came from a
Limbo described in chapter 7 of the Koran,
from the Al Aaraaf of the Arabians, a medium between Heaven & Hell, where men suffer no punishment, but yet do not
attain that tranquil & even happiness which they suppose to be the characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. . . . I have placed
this "Al Aaraaf" in the celebrated star discovered by [the Danish astronomer] Tycho Brahe which appeared and
disappeared so suddenly. . . . Even after death, those who make choice of the star as their residence do not
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enjoy immortalitybut, after a second life of high excitement, sink into forgetfulness & death. . . . The poem commences
with a sonnet (illegitimate) à la mode de Byron in his ''Prisoner of Chillon." But this is a digression.
Poe's use of Tycho Brahe's discovery on November 11, 1572, of the star he called Al Aaraaf may have been influenced by the
way Keats had used the discovery in 1781 of the planet Uranus (which he compared to the excitement he felt when first reading
Homer in English) in his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816). Poe completed only two of the projected
four parts of his longest poem (which few readers have wished any longer) and seemed to suggest, in the vaguest possible way,
that one might avoid earthly sin through devotion to higher beauty. The best part of the poem is the lyrical apostrophe to the
goddess of harmony, whose name he borrowed from one of the Sirens and later used as the title of one of his best stories:
Ligeia! Ligeia!
My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea
Will to melody run,
O! is it thy will
On the breezes to toss?
Or, capriciously still
Like the lone Albatross,
Incumbent on night
(As she is on the air)
To keep watch with delight
On the harmony there?
The failure of Poe's longest poem undoubtedly influenced his belief, later expressed in "The Poetic Principle," that a poem, to be
effective, must be short.
The most accomplished poem in Poe's second volume was his "SonnetTo Science," a romantic protest against scientific
rationalism, which destroys the mythology that nourishes and sustains the creative imagination:
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? . . .
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
and driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
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This theme had been similarly expressed in William Blake's antirationalist poem, "Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau"
(1803).
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
Between his second and third volumes of poetry Poe wrote an important autobiographical poem, "Alone" (1829). Originally
inscribed in a lady's album, it was not published until 1875. Poe had been orphaned at the age of two, taken in but not adopted
by his foster parents, and kept in a dubious and insecure social position. His transatlantic voyages and five years of education in
England during his childhood, his artistic temperament and nascent poetic powers made him feeland actually bean exceptional,
isolated individual. In "Alone," an introspective and analytical poem about his youth, he emphasized the difference between his
feelings and those of others, and his pessimistic tendency to see, "When the rest of Heaven was blue / . . . a demon in my view:
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others wereI have not seen
As others sawI could not bring
My passions from a common spring
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrowI could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone
And all I lov'dI lov'd alone.
After being bought out of the army Poe became an unlikely cadet at West Point. While there he began to construct his Byronic
persona andquickly losing interest in military mattersconcentrated his efforts in publishing his third volume of poetry. Poe
amused his classmates at West Point, as he had done at the University of Virginia, with his own verse. One friend, perceiving a
new aspect of Poe's character, after he had decided to leave the Academy, mentioned that "he would often write some of the
most forcible and vicious doggerel. . . . I have never seen a man whose hatred was so intense." The only surviving example of
Poe's West Point verse is a tame squibrather than biting
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satireon the martinet Lieutenant Joseph Locke who taught military tactics and, as inspector, was responsible for reporting all
infractions of the rules. Mentioning the eminent philosopher who shared the officer's surname, Poe wrote:
John Locke was a notable name;
Joe Locke is a greater; in short,
The former was well known to fame,
But the latter's well known "to report."
Eager to see Poe's scandalous satires in print, most of the cadets subscribed seventy-five cents each to underwrite publication.
This sum was deducted from their official accounts by the treasurer of the Academy, who in April 1831 sent Poe a check for
$170. Poe's heavily revised and considerably augmented third volume, Poems, was brought out by Elam Bliss in New York the
following month in an edition of about five hundred copies. In gratitude it was dedicated to the "United States Corps of Cadets."
But this volume was received by them "with a general expression of disgust." The puny, miserably produced booklet, bound in
green boards and badly printed on coarse paper, "contained not one of the squibs and satires upon which his reputation at the
Academy had been built up."
Poe had published half his poems by 1831. But he had earned nothing from his verse, and the following year began writing
stories out of financial necessity. He had made considerable poetic progressnot only in new, but also in revised poemsfrom 1827
to 1831, as he struggled to free himself from dependence on John Allan and achieve artistic as well as personal maturity. His
best poems from the early years, in addition to "SonnetTo Science," are "Israfel," "The Sleeper," "The Valley of Unrest," "The
City in the Sea,'' and the first "To Helen" (all 1831).
Israfel, according to the Koran and Poe's note to that poem, is an angel "whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest
voice of all God's creatures." In this mysteriously incantatory poem Poe, aspiring to the heights of poetic inspiration, suggests
that it would be much more difficult for the melodiously named Israfel, if burdened by mortal constraints, to sing joyously of
earthly sorrows. Conversely, mortal poets would sing more beautifully if they enjoyed Israfel's celestial state:
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If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
Poe found in Romantic poetry an artistic correlative for his own unhappy life. He believed the most beautiful poetry came from
the deepest feelings (the "heart-strings"), but that it was difficult to write in a philistine world that constrained and ignored the
poet's art.
"The Sleeper," "The Valley of Unrest," and "The City in the Sea" form a distinct thematic group and represent a self-conscious
dramatization of doom. "The Sleeper" is Poe's first expression of his characteristic portrayal of the twilight state between life
and death. The grieving lover wishes a peaceful sleep for the beautiful dead woman, and morbidly prays, ''Soft may the worms
about her creep!" But he also fears that her rest will be disturbed. In "The Valley of Unrest" the imaginary landscape reflects
human sadness as nature weeps for the man's loss of innocence. The restlessness of the sad valley is evoked by the
magnificently melancholy descriptions of its trees:
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like the chill seas
Around the misty Hebrides!,
and of its flowers:
They weep:from off their delicate stems
Perennial tears descend in gems.
"The City in the Sea"inspired by accounts in Flavius Josephus's History of the Jewish Wars (written in the first century A.D.) of
the wicked biblical city of Gomorrah, which lay buried, decomposing, and sinking beneath the hideously serene waters of the
Dead Seaportrays Poe's ghastly apocalyptic vision.
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently. . .
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
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The viol, the violet, and the vine. . . .
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
During schooldays in Richmond Poe, for the first time, had "lov'd alone." He had met Jane Stanard, the mother of his friend
Robert, and had given her all the affectionate devotion of a son. Whenever he was unhappy at home he sought her sympathy,
and always found comfort and consolation. Deeply despondent when Jane died insane at the age of twenty-eight in April 1824,
he often visited her grave with her son.
Jane Stanard, "the first, purely ideal love of my soul," inspired Poe's most beautiful elegiac love lyric. Changing Jane to the
more poetic "Helen" and addressing her with his favorite woman's name (variants of which appear in the later "To Helen," in
"Eleonora," and in "Lenore''), he compares, in sensual rhythm, her sustaining loveliness, which symbolizes a visionary classical
ideal, to ancient triremes that carry an exhausted but victorious Greek warrior home from the fragrant coast of Asia Minor. The
poem contains, at the end of the second stanza, two of Poe's finest and most famous lines; and it portrays the older, maternal,
unattainable Jane, as he gazed at her from afar, as the statuesque soul who embodies Hellenic perfection:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!
Poe had brought out accomplished volumes of verse when he was eighteen and twenty years old. But his Poems of 1831, an
extremely impressive
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achievement for a young man of twenty-two, was the best book written, so far, by an American poet.
As Poe entered manhood the unbearable tensions in his divided personality led him to perversely self-destructive behavior, to
conflict with authority and to sometimes morbid despair. He would communicate this dark mood to his correspondents in an
attempt to elicit their pity and sympathy, and kindly friends would offer encouragement and try to coax him out of his
melancholy. But Poe's deep-rooted gloom went far beyond the characteristic melancholy of Byron and Coleridge, and could not,
despite encouragement from friends, be readily dismissed. After searching his soul he recorded one of his most personal and
profound beliefs. "To be thoroughly conversant with man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of
Despair." There is no escape to the dream-world in "To One in Paradise" (1834), whereas in "Alone"ineradicable grief
overshadows the present and blights the future:
Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
"On! on!"but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!
In December 1835 Poe celebrated his appointment as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond by publishing in
that journal scenes from his unfinished closet drama Politian. Though it was named after an Italian poet and imitated the
hackneyed and tedious conventions of Jacobean tragedy, the play in verse was actually based on the notorious incident that had
taken place in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1825. Colonel Solomon Sharp, a politician, had seduced Ann Cook, who bore him a
child. When the child died, he broke his promise and refused to marry her. Jereboam Beauchamp, an attorney, though much
younger than Ann, sought her hand. She finally agreed to marry him if he promised to kill Sharp before the wedding.
Beauchamp challenged him to a duel, but Sharp, being in the wrong, refused to fight. At 2 A.M. on November 7 Beauchamp
called Sharp to the door of his house and stabbed him in the heart. After a trial Beauchamp was condemned to death and Ann
acquitted of complicity in the crime. Both
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attempted suicide. Ann died, Beauchamp survived and was hanged on July 7, 1826. This story of revenge also inspired Thomas
Holley Chivers's Conrad and Eudora (1834) and William Gilmore Simms's Beauchamp (1842) as well as Robert Penn Warren's
World Enough and Time (1950). When reviewing Simms's novel Poe wrote: "No more thrilling, no more romantic tragedy did
ever the brain of a poet conceive than was the tragedy of Sharp and Beauchamp."
Unfortunately, Poe know no more about Renaissance Italy than he did about Central Asia at the time of Tamerlane. The wooden
hero, archaic style, and melodramatic plot of Politian did not do justice to this tragic story. There was a vast, fatal chasm
between his theory and practice, and this play did precisely what he would warn against in his own dramatic criticism. "The first
thing necessary," Poe later wrote, "is to burn and bury the 'old models,' and to forget, as quickly as possible, that ever a play had
been penned. . . . A closet-drama [not meant to be performed on stage] is an anomalya paradoxa mere figure of speech. . . . The
proof of the dramarism is the capacity for representation."
In the play Poe names the characters after historical figures. But he conflates the Italian poet Angelo Poliziano with the English
Earl of Leicester (a contemporary of Shakespeare). Leicester, who is visiting Rome, represents Beauchamp. Baldassare
Castiglione (the real author of The Book of the Courtier) is Sharp. Both men are rivals for the love of Lalage. The pointless
repetition of banalities in one brief excerpt suggests the astonishing awfulness of this play:
Di Broglio: I've news for you both. Politian is expected
Hourly in RomePolitian, Earl of Leicester!
We'll have him at the wedding. 'Tis his first visit
To the imperial city.
Alessandra: What! Politian
Of Britain, Earl of Leicester?
Di Broglio: The same, my love.
We'll have him at the wedding.
It is not surprising that a literary friend, after reading the play, advised Poe to abandon tragedy and write farces in the manner of
French vaudevilles.
Financial necessity forced Poe to concentrate on fiction, criticism, and editorial jobs from 1835 to 1845. The success of his Tales
in June
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1845 encouraged Wiley & Putnam to bring out his fourth and final volume, The Raven and Other Poems, in a similar format in
November. This edition, dedicated to Elizabeth Barrett, contained twelve (out of thirty) poemsincluding "The Haunted Palace,"
"Dream-Land," and "The Raven"that he had written since the youthful volume of 1831, and several others that had been
extensively revised.
Poe's brief preface was curiously confessional and defensive. He deprecated his own work (as if to forestall hostile critics) and
wrote: "I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself." He also justified reprinting his
eleven youthful poemsincluding "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf"in order to prove the originality of his poetry:
Private reasonssome of which have reference to the sin of plagiarism, and others to the date of Tennyson's first poemshave
induced me, after some hesitation, to re-publish these, the crude companions of my earliest boyhood. They are printed
verbatimwithout alteration from the original editionthe date of which is too remote to be judiciously acknowledged.
"The Haunted Palace" first appeared in Poe's finest story, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), and expresses the themes of
the story in poetic form. The narrator of this tale arrives for a visit at the urgent request of his boyhood friend Roderick Usher,
and is "ushered" into a strange chamber to greet his host. The weirdly eccentric Usher is an irreclaimable eater of opium, which
intensifies experience at the same time that it allows him to escape from reality, and suffers excruciatingly ''from a morbid
acuteness of the senses." After Usher's twin sister Madeline passes through the chamber like an apparition, the narrator learns
that she is gradually wasting away with a mysterious disease.
A decadent but singularly talented hermit, Usher improvises long musical dirges, paints phantasmagoric conceptions of long
sealed tunnels bathed with ghastly and inappropriate rays, and writes an allegorical poem, "The Haunted Palace," in which a
"hideous throng" of "evil things" prophesy his doom. Poe explained that "by the Haunted Palace I mean to imply a mind
haunted by phantomsa disordered brain." To the narrator the poem suggests that Usher is gradually losing his mind:
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And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the encrimsoned windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laughbut smile no more.
The poet-critic A. E. Housman admired the sensual music of this poem, but felt the allegory in the first four stanzasbefore the
mood changes to suggest desolation and destructionwas too insistently schematic:
The Haunted Palace is one of Poe's best poems so long as we are content to swim in the sensations it evokes and only
vaguely to apprehend the allegory. We are roused to discomfort, at least I am, when we begin to perceive how exact in
detail the allegory is; when it dawns upon us that the fair palace door is Roderick Usher's mouth, the pearl and ruby his
teeth and lips, the yellow banners his hair, the ramparts plumed and pallid his forehead, and when we are reduced to
hoping, for it is no more than a hope, that the wingéd odours have no connexion with hair-oil.
After Usher has recited the premonitory poem, Madeline apparently dies and is prematurely entombed in the family vault. But
when she manages to escape and clasps Roderick in a vengeful death-embrace, he finally succumbs to the terrors he had
anticipated throughout the story and expressed in the poem. As the narrator flees the house during a violent storm, its fissure
widens and he hears the final death cry of Madeline, "My brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunderthere was a
long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand watersand the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and
silently over the fragments of the 'House of Usher.'"
Poe's preoccupation with unnatural and irrational states of consciousness that free the mind from the constraints of reason and
allow it to enter the realms of imagination inevitably attracted him to dreams and the unconscious. "Dream-Land" (1844)a land
of death and of nightmareexplores unknown areas of the human mind as the dreamer awakens and describes his vision:
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By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon [phantom], named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Spaceout of Time.
In this hypnotic poem the traveler-narrator has escaped from the agonizing time and space of the real world into the
disintegrating phantasmagoric landscapes where he encounters spectral "Memories of the Past." But this mysterious though
strangely soothing land hides its mournful meaning from him. His sad soul can behold it, like St. Paul in I Corinthians 13:12,
only through a darkened glass that obscures his perception but diminishes his pain.
Although Poe's works are unique in the literature of his time, they have striking affinities with two painters who were his
contemporaries. Poe and Francisco Goya (17461828) both helped define the origins of the modern temper in literature and in art.
The nightmares of flying demons in "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (Caprichos, no. 43) foreshadow the morbid
opium dreams in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and the monstrous nightmares in ''Dream-Land":
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls,
By each spot the most unholy
In each nook most melancholy,
There the traveller meets aghast
Sheeted Memories of the Past.
Poe's connection with the English visionary painter John Martin (17891854) is even more remarkable. In June 1841 Poe wrote a
charming fantasy, "The Island of the Fay," to accompany an engraving, by his Philadelphia friend John Sartain, after a painting
by John Martin. But his closest affinities are with Martin's gigantic, apocalyptic paintings (as Poe wrote in "Dream-Land") of
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire.
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Like John Martin, Poe portraysin works like "The City in the Sea" and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pymancient cities
overwhelmed and devastated by cataclysmic floods; fantastic, menacing, fire-swept, blood-soaked landscapes; demonic figures,
claustrophobic caverns, eerie turreted castles hanging on the edge of jagged mountains; and monstrous boulders thundering
down to the depths of desolate valleys.
Poe had dedicated The Raven to Elizabeth Barrett, praised her poetic inspiration and pure art, and wrote that "with the exception
of Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall,' I have never read a poem combining so much of the fiercest passion with so much of the most
delicate imagination, as [her poem] 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship.' "And he indicated his high opinion of this work by imitating
its complicated rhyme and rhythm in "The Raven." In "Lady Geraldine's Courtship'' Barrett wrote: "With a murmurous stir
uncertain, in the air a purple curtain," and Poe echoed this with: "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain."
When "The Raven" appeared as the title poem of Poe's book he prefaced the volume with a gracious tribute, dedicating the
volume to her "With the most Enthusiastic Admiration and with the most Sincere Esteem." Acknowledging this tribute in April
1846, Barrett described the unnerving effect "The Raven" had in England and cunningly praised the rhythm that Poe had stolen
from her own poem:
Your "Raven" has produced a sensation, a "fit horror," here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and
some by the music. I hear of persons haunted by the "Nevermore," and one acquaintance of mine who has the misfortune
of possessing a "bust of Pallas" never can bear to look at it in the twilight. I think you would like to be told our great poet,
Mr. Browning . . . was struck much by the rhythm of that poem.
Barrett could not quite explain its powerful impact and the conflicting emotions the poem had inspired, and told Browning:
"There is poetry in the man, though, now & then seen between the great gaps of bathos. Politian will make you laughas the
'Raven' made me laugh, though with something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon people."
Poe's symbolic ravenwhich follows the Romantic tradition of Coleridge's albatross, Shelley's skylark, and Keats' nightingalewas
influenced not only by Barrett's "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" but also by Grip, the raven, "the embodied spirit of evil," in
Dickens's Barnaby
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Rudge (1841). In one scene of that early novel, which describes the destructive events that took place in London in 1780,
Barnaby has been arrested and imprisoned for his part in the Gordon Riots. Grip, the raven, remains faithful to his master.
They sit and brood in the semi-darkness of the cell, and the sunlight filters through the narrow window, casting the
shadow of the bars upon the floor, and Grip's shadow, too, when he chooses to sit upon the window ledge. The whole
atmosphere of the prison is somber and chilled. The flames of the fiercely burning city sometimes reflect in Grip's eyes.
Poe had pondered for several years the mournful sound of the long o in the key word, "Nevermore," as well as the foreboding
central symbol in the poem. He wrote "Lenore" in 1831; he named one kind of benign quiet "no more" in "Silence" (1840); he
used the word ''evermore" in "The Conqueror Worm" (1843); and "nothing more," "evermore," and "word Lenore" finally
evolve into "Nevermore" in "The Raven." Poe explained the dramatic action of the poem in "The Philosophy of Composition"
(1846):
A raven, having learned by rote the single word "Nevermore," and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven
at midnight, through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleamsthe chamberwindow of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased.
An incantatory first-person narrative with cunning internal rhyme, "The Raven" portrays the monomaniacal obsession of a
melancholy man who (like Roderick Usher) is hovering on the edge of madness. The marble bust of Pallas on which the bird
perches represents intellectual wisdom; the plumed, ill-omened raven stands for intuitive truth. As grief dominates hope, the
deranged speaker demands a comforting answer that the monodic bird"emblematical [Poe said] of Mournful and Never-ending
Remembrance"cannot provide. All his questions are answered negatively, all consolation refused. As his self-torturing anguish
intensifies, the hopeless suffering narrator is forced to realize that there will be no reunion, after death, with the lost Lenore:
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that heaven that bends above usby that God we both adore
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore
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Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."
In his fascinating, highly original, but not strictly accurate essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe gave an idealized and
rationalized account of how he conceived, composed, and completed his most famous poem. After considering the length, effect
to be conveyed, tone, refrain, and character of the crucial, oft-repeated word, he chose "Nevermore" and a nonreasoning creature
that was capable of speech, combining "a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word
'Nevermore.' "Ignoring his debt to Elizabeth Barrett, Poe claimed that "nothing ever remotely approaching this [stanzaic]
combination has ever been attempted.'' He then explained the masochistic impulse of the narrator, who questions the raven "half
in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture. . . . He experiences a phrenzied pleasure in so
modeling his questions as to receive from the expected 'Nevermore' the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow."
Poe was delighted with this poem. When he met the Kentucky poet William Ross Wallace on the streets of New York, he
expressed his naive and egoistical enthusiasm.
"Wallace," said Poe, "I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written."
"Have you?" said Wallace. "That is a fine achievement."
"Would you like to hear it?" said Poe.
"Most certainly," said Wallace.
Thereupon Poe began to read the soon-to-be-famous verses in his best waywhich . . . was always an impressive and
captivating way. When he had finished it he turned to Wallace for his approval of themwhen Wallace said:
"Poethey are fine; uncommonly fine."
"Fine?" said Poe, contemptuously. "Is that all you can say for this poem? I tell you it's the greatest poem that was ever
written."
"The Raven," which told a concrete, dramatic story, was an immediate sensation, and Poe awokelike Byron after the publication
of Childe Harold's Pilgrimageto find himself famous. Surpassing the popularity of any previous American poem, "The Raven"
was reprinted throughout the country and inspired a great number of imitations and parodies. Poe frequently appeared,
throughout 1845, as a literary lion in fashionable salons. Poe had written this celebrated poem, he frankly
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told a friend, to achieve popularity, and had surpassed his wildest expectations: " 'The Raven' has had a great 'run'but I wrote it
for the express purpose of runningjust as I did [my story] 'The Gold-Bug.' The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow."
An extremely effective orator, Poe had a soft, mellow voice and a slight Southern accent. He dressed, as always, in mournful
raven black and would often be asked to read his famous poem. Adjusting the atmosphere to suit the mood of his work, "he
would turn down the lamps till the room was almost dark," one listener recalled, "then standing in the center of the apartment he
would recite those wonderful lines in the most melodious of voices. . . . So marvelous was his power as a reader that the
auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken." Elmira Royster Shelton, the Richmond sweetheart
who met Poe again at the end of his life, remembered that his recitals could terrify as well as bewitch his audience: "When
Edgar read 'The Raven,' he became so wildly excited that he frightened me, and when I remonstrated with him he replied he
could not help itthat it set his brain on fire."
Despite his self-deprecating preface and the hostility his severe literary criticism had aroused, The Raven received many
favorable reviews. His former employer, Nathaniel Willis, called Poe "unquestionably, a man of genius" and urged him to
abandon destructive criticism and concentrate on his poetry. Poe's sometime friend, Thomas Dunn English, agreed that Poe's
"power to conceive and execute the [poetic] effect, betokens the highest genius," and pronounced him "the first poet of his
school." The South Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simms, despite having suffered rough handling in Poe's reviews,
expressed his high opinion of Poe's imaginative powers and characterized him as ''a fantastic and a mystica man of dreamy
mood and wandering fancies." Noting the difficulty of Poe's work, Simms said "his scheme of poem requires that his reader
shall surrender himself to influences of pure imagination." And the Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, in an unusually fairminded review, wrote that Poe's poems "breathe a passionate sadness, relieved sometimes by touches very lovely and tender."
After the publication of The Raven Poe seemed to have difficulty composing, and wrote only one or two important poems each
year during the final lustrum of his life. A Richmond friend recorded that "Mr.
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Poe seems to have been incapable of writing poetry with sustained effort. Impulsive, erratic, he would soon weary of the task
and lay aside the sketchy outlines of his poem, to be filled up, touched and retouched."
Many of the poems written during his last years were addressed to specific womenFanny Osgood, Marie Louise Shew, Helen
Whitman, and Annie Richmond. They inspired his romantic feelings and he courted them, assiduously but disastrously, after the
death of his wife Virginia from tuberculosis in January 1847. These women were attracted to Poe's creative genius, his prestige
and power in the world of letters, his notorious character, and tragic demeanor. As Lady Caroline Lamb said of the reckless
Byron, "He was mad, bad, and dangerous to know."
Poe met the first of these ladies, Fanny Osgood, in March 1845. A sentimental Massachusetts poetess of slight talent but great
charm, two years younger than Poe and in delicate health, Fanny was a lively, kindly, and attractive woman with two children.
"In character she is ardent and sensitive," Poe wrote, with considerable warmth, "a worshipper of beauty; universally admired,
respected, and beloved. In person she is about the medium height and slender; complexion usually pale; hair black and glossy;
eyes a clear, luminous grey, large, and with great capacity for expression." They soon established a sympathetic rapport, and Poe
felt she was the only friend who really understood him.
Poe enhanced and etherealized his courtship by writing three rather slight and self-consciously literary poems to Fanny. Like
many other writers, Poe extracted the maximum benefit from each of his poems. The utterly conventional, all-purpose, and
continuously recycled "To F_____S O_____D" was originally written in 1834 for his cousin Elizabeth Herring, addressed the
following year to Eliza White (the daughter of the publisher of the Southern Literary Messenger) and finally touched up to
praise Fanny's virtues: fidelity, gentleness, grace, and beauty. In a similar fashion the cost-efficient "To F__________" was
originally addressed in 1835 "To Mary'' and retitled ten years later. In this poemwhose lines, "And thus thy memory is to me /
Like some enchanted far-off isle," echo the famous opening lines of "To Helen"the dreams and memory (rather than the reality)
of Fanny grant him peace and solace, and allow him to escape from a troubled, stormy world. The third poem, "A Valentine,"
written on February 14, 1846,
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was the only one composed expressly for Fanny. In these verses Poe says that her name (revealed by reading the first letter of
the first line, the second letter of the second line, and so on), often uttered by poets, is a "synonym for Truth."
Marie Louise Shewwho had devotedly nursed both Virginia and Poebecame, after the death of his wife, an object of Poe's
affections. Unlike Fanny Osgood, Mrs. Shewthen married to and later divorced from a New York water cure physicianwas an
unsophisticated lady with no interest in literature. Plain-looking, kind-hearted, and deeply religious, she generously devoted her
life to nursing the poor and the suffering.
Imitating the pattern of his courtship with Fanny, Poe began by writing valentine poems to Marie Louise, and followed them
with passionate letters. In his description of an ideal landscape in his story "The Domain of Arnheim" (1847), Poe also paid
tribute to Marie Louise by writing of "the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness and love enveloped his
existence in the purple atmosphere of Paradise." "To M. L. S__________" (February 1847) conventionally praised her soft
words, seraphic glance, fervent devotion, and angelic spirit, and expressed gratitude "for the resurrection of deep-buried faith /
In Truthin Virtuein Humanity." ''To [Marie Louise]," published exactly a year later, described the difficulty of expressing his
love for her in "unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought"; and echoed the words and images of Keats's sonnet
"When I Have Fears" in his homage to her:
for 'tis not feeling,
This standing motionless upon the golden
Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams,
Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista,
And thrilling as I see . . .
Amid empurpled vapors, far away
To where the prospect terminatesthee only.
While Poe was visiting her home in May 1847 Marie Louise briefly assumed the role of Muse and, when inspiration was
flagging, helped him complete the first draft of "The Bells":
He came in and said, "Marie Louise, I have to write a poem. I have no feeling, no sentiment, no inspiration." I answered
we will have supper and I will help
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you. So after tea had been served in a conservatory with windows open, near a churchI playfully said, here is paper. A
Bell (very jolly and sharp) rang at the corner of the street. He said "I so dislike the noise of bells tonight. I cannot write. I
have no subject. I am exhausted." So I took his pen and wrote "The Bells. By E. A. Poe," and I mimicked his style, and
wrote ''the Bells, the little silver Bells, &c. &c." he finishing each line.
"The Bells" (1849), once a popular favorite at public recitations, is a somewhat mechanical, onomatopoeic, forced tour-de-force,
in which the four resonant stanzas describe both the positive and negative sensations suggested by the various sounds of bells.
The silver sledge bells tinkle merrily
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that over sprinkle
All the Heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight.
The melodious golden wedding bells foretell a world of happiness and harmony. The brazen "alarum" bells inspire terror as they
clang and clash to announce the danger of a frantic fire:
In the startled ear of Night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek.
Finally, the climactic, solemn tolling of iron bells, influenced by some unknown demonic power, suggests the groaning and
sobbing of mourners in a funeral:
In the silence of the night
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy meaning of the tone!
Poe's third lady, Helen Whitman, was a poetical widow living in Providence. Romantic in temperament and interested in
spiritualism, she shaded her eyes with a fan and existed in the same crepuscular light that pervaded Poe's stories. She clothed her
fragile beauty in silken draperies, lace scarves, floating veils, and trailing shawls. And, like one of Poe's fictional invalids,
frequently sniffed strong-smelling ether as a stimulant for her weak heart.
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Poe's romance with Helen began, as with Fanny, with a sentimental poetic flirtation. After she published "To Edgar A. Poe," the
first of sixteen effusive poems addressed to him, he responded with his appropriately vague and ethereal "To Helen." This
conventional poem opens with his recollection of the first time he saw (but did not speak to) her, when he was visiting
Providence in July 1845 with Fanny Osgood. Helen, on that fateful midnight, was dressed in white and taking a breath of air in
her enchanted rose garden:
Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death
Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses
That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted
By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.
The divine light in Helen's eyes inspired Poe with the hope of future love; and he wishes "to be saved by their bright light, / And
purified in their electric fire."
Annie Richmond was a kind and simple lady, more like Marie Louise Shew than Fanny or Helen. Living in Lowell,
Massachusetts, she was happily married to a prosperous paper manufacturer and had one daughter. Though she lacked
intellectual and literary interests, Poe and Annie's strong mutual attraction (tolerated by her husband) quickly developed into a
passionate but platonic romance. Poe seemed to love her more deeply than any of the women he was involved with at the end of
his life.
As usual, Poe wrote a story and poems about Annie, and sent her intensely emotional love letters. In "Landor's Cottage" (1849),
a description of an ideal house in a charming setting and complement to "The Domain of Arnheim," Annie makes a cameo
appearance as Marie Louise had done in the earlier story. Poe emphasizes their immediate and intuitive sympathy as well as her
grace, enthusiasm, romantic expression, and gleaming eyes.
Poe's idealized portrait of Annie in the story was followed in March 1849 by his long love-offering, "For Annie." This was the
best as well as the most tender and melodious poem that Poe had written to a woman since he had composed the first "To
Helen" for Jane Stanard in 1831. ''For Annie" describes Poe's recovery from his suicide attempt with an overdose of laudanum
the previous November and alludes to the "holy promise" he had extracted from Annie: "that, under all cir-
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cumstances, you will come to me on my bed of death." It opens with a dramatic, throbbing rhythm that expresses Poe's gratitude
for recovery from his dangerous illness:
Thank heaven! the crisis
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last
And the fever called "Living"
Is conquered at last. . . .
The sicknessthe nausea
The pitiless pain
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain.
Freed at last from the torments of passion, his tantalized spirit, in a deathlike but fully conscious state, finds repose amidst the
myrtle, rose, rosemary, pansies, and rue that symbolizein the contemporary "language-of-flowers" bookslove, beauty, fidelity,
thought, and grace.
Halfway through the poem the focus shifts to the true and beautiful Annie, whom he sees in a dream that suggests their
maternal-filial relations. Annie now protects him and shields him from harm:
She tenderly kissed me,
She fondly caressed,
And then I fell gently
To sleep on her breast.
The final stanza, which ends on an unusually positive note, provides a gentle contrast to the suffering suggested in the opening
one. Poe attributes his recovery to the devoted care, loyalty, and love that are expressed in the luminous eyes of the kind but
passive Annie:
But my heart it is brighter
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie.
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T. S. Eliot rightly observed of Poe's memorable rhythm: "Only after you find that it goes on throbbing in your head, do you
begin to suspect that perhaps you will never forget it."
Poe, an unreliable and drunken suitor, never managed to marry any of the women he courted toward the end of his lifethough he
was briefly engaged to two of them. He continued to live with his devoted aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, and to remain
faithful, in his pathological fashion, to the memory of his dead wife. Poe's deeply felt though somewhat morbid and sentimental
sonnet, "To My Mother" (1849), is dedicated, not to his real mother Eliza Poe or to his foster mother Frances Allanwho were
never entirely satisfactorybut to Maria Clemm. She was also bound to him as the mother of his wife and he addresses her with
the passion of a lover:
Because I felt that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among the burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother,"
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you
You who are more than mother unto me. . . .
My mothermy own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I love so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew.
The greatest poem of Poe's last years was "Ulalume" (December 1848), whose title suggests ululation, or wailing. Inspired by
the death of Virginia, this tortured tribute was an appropriate memorial to his wife. When Poe read this work aloud to guests
before publication, "he remarked that he feared that it might not be intelligible to us, as it was scarcely clear to himself." But its
meaning is not quite as obscure as he suggested. The poem concerns the conflict between the soul (symbolized by Psyche), who
urges him to remain loyal to the memory of his dead wife, and sensual love (represented by Astarte, the Phoenician moon
goddess associated with Venus), who suggests the possibility of a new love.
The rhythmic and hypnotic opening stanza describes the late season and spectral setting (reminiscent of the opening paragraph
of "The Fall of the House of Usher"). It alludes to the French operatic composer Daniel François Auber and to Robert WeirPoe's
former teacherwho taught drawing at West Point for more than forty years:
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The skies they were ashen and sober,
The leaves they were crispéd and sere
The leaves they were withering and sere:
It was night, in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir:
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Roaming, restless, and alone, in this fantastic landscape, which he compares to Mount Yaanek (or Erebus), a recently discovered
volcano in Antarctica, the narrator engages in serious discourse with his Soul. As the night advances he describesin exquisitely
delicate linesa new moon and associates it with Astarte:
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn.
Then, remembering the satanic torments of "the worm [who] never dies" in Isaiah 66:24, he seeks in the flickering stars the
forgetful "Lethean peace of the skies." Though Psyche warns him against those stars, he replies that they are merely part of a
dream that promises ''Hope and Beauty" and poses no danger to him. After pacifying Psyche he reaches the door of a tomb,
which, she tells him, "'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!" Suddenly, he realizes that he has unconsciously returned to the grave
of his beloved on the first anniversary of her death. She has shaped his vision of the weird landscape that contains her "dread
burden." Realizing that he is still tormented by an inextinguishable grief, he knows he will always remain in her thrall:
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crispéd and sere
As the leaves that were withering and sere
And I cried"It was surely October,
On this very night of last year,
That I journeyedI journeyed down here!
That I brought a dread burden down here
On this night, of all nights in the year,
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Ah, what demon has tempted me here?
Well, I know now, this dim lake of Auber
This misty mid region of Weir:
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
In May 1849 Poe completed his last poem, "Annabel Lee." Though early poemslike "Tamerlane" and ''Al Aaraaf"were
allegorical, his later works, especially those about women, became increasingly autobiographical. His favorite theme, grieving
for the death of a beautiful woman, had been the subject of "Lenore," "The Sleeper," "To One in Paradise," "The Raven," and
"Ulalume," and recurred in "Annabel Lee." But in the last poem, as in the story "Eleonora," young love transcends death and
survives in spiritual union.
This mournful dirge on ideal love achieves its effects through subtle variations and balladlike repetition. The slightly archaic,
fairy-tale opening describes the idyllic setting:
It was many and many a year ago
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
But even the angels became jealous of this innocent child-love. They sent down a chilling wind that carried Annabel away and
"shut her up in a sepulchre / In this kingdom by the sea." Their souls remained linked, however, and the narrator continues to
dream of Annabel and to feel her presence in his life. At night he demonstrates his morbid devotion to her memory by sleeping
next to her grave:
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darlingmy darlingmy life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Annie Richmond, whose name resembled the heroine's, was the first to see the manuscript of "Annabel Lee." Sarah Anna Lewis
(whose poems Poe had been bribed to review), Helen Whitman, and Elmira Shelton (whom he would soon court in Richmond)
each believed that
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she was the subject of the poem. But Fanny Osgood was surely right in thinking that this poemlike "The Raven" and
"Ulalume"was really about Virginia Poe. Virginia was the only one of these women he had loved when she was a child, who
had loved him exclusively, who had been his bride, who had shivered during a fatal illness and who had died.
The posthumous publication of Poe's last poem was unusually complex. To make certain that it would appear in print, Poe gave
a copy to his literary executor, Rufus Griswold, sold the manuscript to the Richmond editor John Thompson to repay a fivedollar debt, and also sold it for publication to Sartain's Union Magazine. After Poe's unexpected death, Griswold and Thompson
both jumped the gun: the former included it in his obituary of October 9, 1849, the latter in the November issue of his Southern
Literary Messenger. It did not appear in Sartain's until January 1850.
In December 1848, just before his break with Helen Whitman, Poe published in the Southern Literary Messenger his most
important aesthetic statement, "The Poetic Principle," which he read at his impressive public lecture in Providence that month.
Poe defined poetry as "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty" and illustrated his ideas with excerpts from some of his favorite
authors: Moore, Hood, Byron, Shelley, and Tennyson, as well as from Bryant and Longfellow.
Arguing strongly against "epic mania" and prolixity in poetry, Poe declared that
a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms. . . .
That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition
of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flagsfailsa revulsion ensuesand then the poem is,
in effect, and in fact, no longer such . . . [because it has lost] that vital requisite in all works of Art, Unity.
Long works like Paradise Lost, Poe maintained, were "merely a series of minor poems." This theory explained the failure of his
only long poem, "Al Aaraaf," and his inability to finish any of his other long works: Politian, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym, and The Journal of Julius Rodman.
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Poe also criticized poetry written for didactic or moral purposes and expressed his belief in "pure" poetry: "There neither exists
nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignifiedmore supremely noble than this very poemthis poem per sethis poem which is
a poem and nothing morethis poem written solely for the poem's sake." Poe's ideas on brevity, originality, and unity of effect,
his emphasis on music, sound, and rhythm, his belief in suggestiveness, strangeness, and melancholy, surely constitute, as
Edmund Wilson has observed, "the most remarkable body of criticism ever produced in the United States."
Poe's personal and poetic reputation suffered terribly because of Rufus Griswold's malignant obituary of 1849 and memoir of
1850. It did not begin to recover in America until 1875, when Sara Sigourney Rice organized the memorial ceremony by
soliciting statements about Poe's work from eminent writers in America and abroad. She then included these letters in her
volume of reminiscences and speeches. Words of praise arrived not only from Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes, but
also from Tennyson and Swinburne. Rice's volume was the first opportunity for Americans to see how highly Poe was regarded
in Europe.
Tennyson, whose work Poe had admired, reciprocated his feelings and generously called him "the most original genius that
America has produced," one "not unworthy to stand beside Catullus, the most melodious of the Latins, and Heine, the most
tuneful of the Germans." Swinburne took care to emphasize the best part of Poe's uneven work and praised "the special quality
of his strong and delicate genius, so sure of aim and faultless of touch in all the better and finer part of work he has left us."
The English poets who followed Swinburne in the Decadent, Aesthetic, and fin-de-siècle traditionDowson and
Wildeemphasized the beauty of Poe's lyrics and (unlike Emerson and Whitman) were not concerned with the deliberate absence
of "moral principle." Dowson said the euphonious "The viol, the violet, and the vine" from "The City in the Sea" was his
favorite line of poetry. Wilde also praised Poe as "this marvellous lord of rhythmic expression."
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters who first came together in 1848, included Poe in their list of "immortals,"
which, they said, constituted "the whole of their creed." They kept his reputation alive in the dark days between his death and
the memorial ceremony in 1875. The poet and painter Rossetti, who dominated the group, mentioned near the end of his life that
one of his major poems, "The
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Blessed Damozel" (1847), written when he was only eighteen, had been influenced by Poe's "The Raven": "I saw that Poe had
done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse this condition, and give
utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven."
Poe was also important to Victorian authors as a theorist of poetry. Walter Pater, whose aesthetic ideas influenced many late
nineteenth-century writers, took over Poe's concept, expressed in his early "Letter to B_________," that musicwhich produced
pleasurable sensations and stirred men's deepest feelingsintensified the effect of poetry. Poe believed that "music is an essential,
since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is
poetry." Following Poe's emphasis, Pater exalted music as the most abstract and therefore the purest art. In Appreciations (1889)
he called music "the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the
substance, the subject from the expression."
It took one hundred years for Poe's poetic reputation to be fully established in America. In 1949 Eliot, overcoming his initial
reservations, admitted that "by trying to look at Poe through the eyes of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry, I became more
thoroughly convinced of his importance, of the importance of his work as a whole." Eliot's essay was followed by praise from
three leading poets of the next generation. "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe," 1949, by Allen Tate (who, like Baudelaire, had the same
domelike forehead as Poe), the favorable introduction to Poe's works in 1950 by W. H. Auden (who had by then settled in
America), and "The House of Poe," 1959, by Richard Wilbur (who would write a brilliant series of essays about him).
Poe's sometime employer George Graham said that "literature to him was religion; and he, its high-priest." It was this aspect of
Poe that most appealed to the French. He was the catalyst who inspired the high art of Symbolist poetry, which (like most of
Poe's verse) did not narrate events but described psychological states. Like Poe in "The Poetic Principle," the French Symbolists
believed that poetry should create beauty and be "written solely for the poem's sake." It should convey a sense of mystery, and
suggest a superioreven divinereality.
Poe was praised by the Goncourt brothers, by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, by Paul Claudel and André Gide. He also
had a profound influence on Charles Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare and on poems like
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"To She Who Is Too Gay," "The Living Flame," "Spleen," "Voyage to Cythera," and "The Seven Old Men,'' in The Flowers of
Evil (1857), as well as on Arthur Rimbaud's use of synesthesia in his sonnet "Vowels" (1871) and the "unveiling of mysteries" in
A Season in Hell (1873).
Neither Poe's mannered Latinate style nor his highly idiosyncratic content became a direct model for subsequent poetry (as
Pound said: "no one who has tried to write like Poe . . . has done anything good"). Yet his extensive influence on later writers
has been quite out of proportion to the extremely uneven quality of his hundred poems. Though Poe has always appealed to
popular taste, his originality and imagination have also had a considerable impact on the most advanced thinkers and more
serious writers. Poe has overcome his notorious personal reputation (which today makes him interesting rather than repulsive),
survived the vicissitudes of taste during the last hundred and fifty years, and remains our contemporary because he has always
appealed to basic human feelings and expressed universal themes common to all people in all languages: dreams, love, loss;
grief, mourning, alienation; terror and insanity, disease and death.
Jeffrey Meyers
Further Reading
Auden, W. H. "Edgar Allan Poe." In Edward Mendelson, ed., Forewords and Afterwords, pp. 209220. New York: Random
House, 1974.
Davidson, Edward. Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.
Eliot, T. S. "From Poe to Valéry." In T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, pp. 2742. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965.
Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed. The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Scribner's, 1992.
Stovall, Floyd. Edgar Poe the Poet. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969.
Tate, Allan. "The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe" [1968]. In Allan Tate, Memories and Essays, pp. 115127. London: Carcanet,
1976.
Wilbur, Richard. "Introduction." In Richard Wilbur, Poe, pp. 739. New York: Dell, 1959.
Wilbur, Richard. "Poe." In Perry Miller, ed., Major Writers of America, pp. 369398. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.
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Lowell, Teasdale, Wylie, Millay, and Bogan
Passionate expression of emotion, revelation of personal sensibility, apparent delicacy overlaying sensuality and self-assertion,
musicality created by diction and cadence, a vigorous grace of form: these qualities are characteristic of much work by a
succession of American women poets. This tradition reached a peak in the second and third decades of the twentieth century,
when such poets as Sara Teasdale (18841933), Elinor Wylie (18851928), and Edna St. Vincent Millay (18921950) enjoyed
popular favor, flourishing careers, and critical praise.
The reasons for the broad appeal of their musical and moving poems are apparent on first reading. The fascinating complexities
beneath polished surfaces are not. Through the 1940s American students continued to read poems by these women; some of
their work maintained a quiet popularity in the years that followed. Yet by mid-century all threelike other successful female
poets of their erahad fallen into critical disregard.
A new assessment of such disregard, and of the poetry itself, has begun. Understanding the value of these poets' work, and the
reasons behind the changing estimations of that value, restores to us a fuller picture of a vital era in American poetry. It can also
offer us a new avenue into work by other American poets, including not only Amy Lowell (18741925) and Louise Bogan
(18971970) but also such neglected writers as Adelaide Crapsey (18781914), Anne Spencer (18821975), Georgia Douglas
Johnson (18861966), Genevieve
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Taggard (18941948), Eunice Tietjens (18841944), and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 18861961).
For half a century Teasdale, Wylie, and Millay have generally been ignored or treated as embarrassing mistakes in vulgar taste.
Lowell is often presented as an interesting, somewhat comic, figure in literary sociology, but hardly someone to be taken
seriously as a poet. Bogan earned respect for her work as a critic as well as prizes for her poetry, yet all too frequently she too
has been passed over or short-changed or praised in terms that distort her poetic achievement.
What has caused this? A study of anthologies of twentieth-century verse suggests that the changes in critical appraisal do have
some correlation with the gender of the poetsand of those who do the selecting. Important anthologies edited by women and
published in multiple editions from the mid-teens to the mid-thirties (such as Margery Gordon and Marie B. King's Verse of
Our Day, or Harriet Monroe and Alice Crobin Henderson's The New Poetry, or Jesse Belle Rittenhouse's three collections of
"modern verse") contain much greater ratios of female poets to male than do present-day anthologies, edited by men, that cover
the same period.
But gender alone does not explain the situation. Some poetry by women was accorded a place in the canon. The marvelously
dry, and ostensibly self-deprecatory, syllabic verse of Marianne Moore (18871972) evidently did not threaten critics in the
antifeminist period in American literary scholarship that took hold during the thirties and gained strength after World War II.
Even Louise Bogan, whose work derived creative energy from her complex (and sometimes inhibiting) relationship with the
female lyrical tradition, was rather one-sidedly praised by her friend Theodore Roethke for freedom from the "embroidering,"
"lyric . . . posturing," "lamenting the lot of the woman," and "caterwauling" of other women poets. An appearance of neutered
chastity, of restraint in language and content was, it seems, acceptable in ways that stirring self-expression and musicality were
not.
Consciously avant-garde female poets of the early twentieth century have been neglected too, but for different reasons than more
lyrical writers. In the poetry of Gertrude Stein (18741946), Mina Loy (18821966), and Laura Riding Jackson (19011991) the
reader finds difficult experimental language, conspicuous erudition, and profound displays of intellectual force. Loy explored
epistemological, metaphys-
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ical, and aesthetic issues, rejecting traditional concepts of femininity through a rigorous and unsentimental analysis of female
experience and consciousness in patriarchial culture; Stein and Riding Jackson did the same through brilliant complexities of
thought and linguistic innovation. Their avant-garde qualities deprived the three of a broad popular audience, but at least they
could not belittled in terms suggesting a shallow girlishness.
Yet just as the sly subversions and covert sexuality of Moore's poetry have recently been brought to light, so the value of Stein's,
Loy's, and Riding Jackson's work is overcoming critical evasion and sloth. No longer can the poetry of early twentieth-century
American women be limited to one or two representatives accorded a quiet niche within an androcentric hierarchy, if the work
seems inhibited rather than passionate, if it does not boldly claim a place in the grand traditions of English lyric or philosophical
verse, if it eschews heightened sound and assertive rhythms, and if it does not call attention to such disruptive phenomena as
female artistic creativity and female desire. Recent critical and biographical studies such as Jean Gould's and Richard
Benvenuto's on Lowell, William Drake's and Carol Schoen's on Teasdale, Judith Farr's on Wylie, and a growing body of work
on Millay and Bogan reveal the increasing interest in some of these women and their work.
The foundations for the current reassessment were, in fact, laid in 1923, just as the golden years were drawing toward an end. In
her essay "Two Generations in American Poetry," Amy Lowell tells us that from the late nineteenth century through the first
decade of the next American readers of poetry found themselves in "a world of sweet appreciation . . . of caged warblers, which
species of gentle music-makers solaced it monthly from the pages of the 'Century' or the 'Atlantic Monthly.' "Then, as life in the
United States changed, a poetic revolt began. ("Prosperity is the mother of art," writes the pragmatic Lowell, "no matter how
odd such an idea may seem.")
So far, the story is a familiar one, though other critics have found more of interest than Lowell did in such turn-of-the-century
lyric poets as Lizette Woodworth Reese (18561935) and Louise Imogen Guiney (18611920). But observe how Lowell describes
the work of the new generation, the generation of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, H.D. and other Imagists, Edgar Lee Masters, and
(though she does not mention
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him by name) of Ezra Pound: "this new poetry, whether written by men or women, was in essence masculine, virile, very much
alive. Where the nineties had warbled, it was prone to shout."
Observe, too, how she describes the literary generation that followed, a breathtaking ten years later. Of the younger poets, the
ones "doing the better work" she calls the Lyrists. She praises their skill in versification, and declares expression of emotion to
be their "chief stock in trade." The best of them, she tells us, are Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay: "It is, indeed, a
feminine movement, and remains such even in the work of its men."
Readers today may find themselves troubled by Lowell's unexamined images of shouting, virile masculinity and musical,
emotional femininity, even though the poet-critic was quick to describe Wylie as "one of the most intellectual" of American
poets. Yet in understanding the poets and the poetry of the United States from the mid-1910s through the 1930sas in
understanding the history of their changing critical receptionconsiderations of sexual difference and gender politics are
inescapable. Recent scholars, including Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Emily Stipes Watts, Cheryl Walker, Elaine
Showalter, William Drake, Jean Gould, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers, and Bonnie Kime
Scott have followed Lowell's lead in investigating the various powerful effects of gender on the lives and art of literary women
of that era.
One such effect may indeed be "warmth of feeling" or "poetic intensity." In 1951 Louise Bogan stated in her history of
twentieth-century American poetry that the line of this quality "moves on unbroken" from the nineteenth century to the
twentieth, in the poetry of women. And despite the disdain she had professed in 1935 for the work of "female songbirds" and
her "own lyric side,'' Bogan here shows the shift in attitudes that was to continue through her later years. She argues that
restoration of emotional energy to American poetry was grounded in "womanly attributes," was made possible through the
liberating social changes effected by feminists, and was "accomplished almost entirely by women poets through methods which
proved to be as strong as they seemed delicate."
Those strong and delicately realized methods of their craft, that "poetic intensity," the "line of feeling" running through the work
of Lowell, Teasdale, Wylie, Millay, and Bogan herself, commends them to
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us. They (as well as H.D. and their other poetic sisters and daughters) have had to come to terms withto don or drape anewthe
mantle of their nineteenth-century heritage of female lyricism. Most often, they have done so to very good effect.
Eclectic and wide-ranging in her art, Amy Lowell is usually discussed in terms other than her relationship to the female lyrical
tradition. But, in fact, she wrote beautifully of personal passions, and her work is a record of stimulating and successful
experimentation with the music of finely wrought words.
Despite the self-doubts engendered in her as a girl who did not fit the standard image of female beauty, when she came into her
own in her thirties Lowell took herself quite seriously as an artist and as a Professional. She was also generous in her support of
other writers, male as well as female, writing in new voices and new modes, In a successful power stuggle with Ezra Pound she
advocated a collaborativerather than his authoritarianapproach to the editing of the second Imagist anthology. In all of this she
drew on the nineteenth-century tradition of professional women writers, on a conventionally masculine assertiveness, and on the
conventionally feminine ability to connect with others. This same range of traits is evident when she places herself in literary
history.
In her long poem "The Sisters," Lowell constructs for herself a literary ancestry that makes evident the complex relationships of
women writers in her day to their foremothers. The poem begins by explaining the relative scarcity of women poets: it is a result
of the great demands of motherhood and the other "every-day concerns" of women's lives. Here the poet breaks with the many
Victorian writers who celebrated female self-sacrifice and a circumscribed domesticity.
Naming Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson as her "older sisters," Lowell explores their greatness, the
differences among them, and "how extraordinarily unlike / Each is to me." Perhaps, in the way of poets, she protests her
uniqueness a bit too much, but this is hardly surprising in a time when "we women who write poetry" were considered ''a queer
lot." The nineteenth-century female lyricists are left out altogether, and Barrett Browning is chided for her failure to write
"beyond the movement of pentameters." Dickinson is most highly praised, especially for her "range of mind." But when Lowell
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commends Sappho for her impassioned amatory poems and "her loveliness of words," the younger writer praises the very
qualities that distinguished those of her contemporaries she dubbed the Lyrists.
Lowell's covert affinities with other earlier literary women are made clearer in her perceptive and subversive book-length poem,
A Critical Fable, published anonymously in 1922. In this witty, antimisogynist description of the contemporary poetic scene
(which sent the American literary world into a buzz of curiosity, outrage, and sly delight), she again gives Dickinson top marks,
citing her as the one nineteenth-century American poetmale or femaleshe can "sincerely admire." But the poem's narrator
remains open to a variety of poetic styles, assuring us that current literary taste gives "no prominence / To rhyme or the lack of
it."
Here, Lowell jocularly describes herself and her work as "electrical . . . prismatic . . . outrageous . . . erratic / And jarring to
some, but to others ecstatic," an innovator and champion of the bold new generation. Yet she admits "there's always a heart / Hid
away in her poems for the seeking; impassioned, / Beneath silver surfaces cunningly fashioned." Recognizing this is essential to
a complete picture of this poet of many voices and modes.
Those carefully made poems of Lowell's express her belief in the fundamental relationship of poetry and music, a belief that,
despite the formal innovations of much of her poetry, clearly links her to the lyrical tradition. In 1919 she gave a lecture at
Harvard (famous in part for being the first ever given by a woman at that proud institution) entitled "Some Musical Analogies in
Modern Poetry." The preface to Lowell's breakthrough second book, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), advocates an
alternative name for vers libre: "unrhymed cadence," a term that draws deliberately on musicology's vocabulary for expressive
rhythmic phrasing. "Merely chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence," Lowell writes; "it is constructed upon
mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time." This position not only defended free verse against those who criticized it
as impoverished or anarchistic, it also allowed her to publish poems in the new mode alongside sonnets and other metrical
poems with varied rhyme schemesas well as experiments in "polyphonic prose,'' the intense interweaving of vowels, consonants,
and accentual patterns that she liked to compare to the many voices of an orchestra.
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The groundwork for her careful attention to effects of sound must have been laid by the formal poetry of the nineteenth-century
"music-makers" Lowell heard as a child. She grew up listening to the much-admired light verse of her famous cousin James
Russell Lowell, and to what her father chose to read aloud: the songlike poems written (often by women) for children, and
selections from Longfellow or Frances Ridley Havergal's Morning Bells. (Amy Lowell's biographer, S. Foster Damon, describes
this anthology as "abominable"presumably because it contained the sentimental rhymed and metrical verse so popular at the
time.)
In a 1917 essay entitled "Poetry as Spoken Art" we learn something of why Lowell did so well at public readings of her work:
"Poetry is as much an art to be heard as is music," she writes, and gives very good advice on how to read all kinds of poems
aloud. The essay describes the essential linkage of sound and feeling that every lyric poem enacts. It is the "musical quality" of
poetry "which differentiates it from prose, and it is this musical quality which bears in it the stress of emotion without which no
true poetry can exist."
The last six poems in Lowell's Pulitzer Prize-winning book What's O'Clock (which she completed shortly before her death in
1925), exemplify how Lowell found in the sonnet a form still vital, still capable of containing and shaping that "stress of
emotion." The sequence is addressed to Eleonora Duse, the acclaimed actress who more than twenty years before had set young
Amy afire with the idea of making art from words; it explores themes of beauty's endurance and power to inspire. As suits
passionate poems written to this demanding form, metaphors of molding, carving, mirroring, stamping, and lenses made of
"twisted glass" mingle with those evoking the heat and dazzle of intense responses to the actress and her art. The second poem
of the six announces its musical nature by declaring itself "a letter or a poemthe words are set / To either tune." It then describes
the poet (or, in a brilliant ambiguity, the poem itself) as a drop of sealing war "impressed" with ''a fret of workmanship." The
result is "like melted ice"frozen, "precise/ And brittle"; nonetheless, the sonnet suggests, having been so formed, it may show
images of great, even divine, power. And of course, such well-made poems enabled the poet to express quite openly her feelings
for the one she so admired.
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Despite the emotional repression advocated by the androcentric Modernist aesthetic, Lowell's work demonstrates that her selfdescription in "A Critical Fable" is indeed accurate. One indication is her many striking images of sexuality. Some of these are
not gender-marked, or include a phrase, such as "supple-limbed youth" in "White and Green" (1914), that steers the reader
toward assuming heterosexual desire. One of her best-known poems, the free-verse dramatic monologue "Patterns" (1916)
presents female sexuality as ''softness . . . pink and silver" hidden away, waiting to be released by a "heavy-booted," stumbling
male lover. Like earlier female writers of the so-called Erotic school such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox (18501919), Lowell here
objects to the suppression of womanly desire: "passion / Wars against the stiff brocade," against "each button, hook, and lace" of
the persona's proper attire.
The poet sometimesas in the relatively early poems "Clear, with Light Variable Winds," "The Basket," and "The
Shadow"adopted a male point of view when celebrating an idealized female beauty. Over time Lowell increasingly used explicit
images of lesbian eroticism; many of her love poems were inspired by her longtime companion, Ada Dwyer Russell. For
example, in "Aubade" (written in 1913, about a year and a half after Lowell met Russell, and published after Russell began
sharing her home in 1914), the poet writes:
As I would free the white almond from the green husk
So would I strip your trappings off,
Beloved.
And fingering the smooth and polished kernel
I should see that in my hands glittered a gem beyond counting.
The 1919 Pictures of the Floating World is rich with such images. "The Weather-Cock Points South" describes parting the
"leaves" of the beloved, "The smaller ones, / Pleasant to the touch, veined with purple; / The glazed inner leaves," until "you
stood up like a white flower." In "A Decade," Lowell writes: "When you came, you were like red wine and honey, / And the
taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness."
Lowell broke with the previous century by writing, as in these examples, both more far more explicitly and in the Imagist mode.
But at the same time she was carrying on the feminine tradition of ardent love poems. The same held true when she helped
enrich twentieth-century
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American poetry by drawing on the literary heritage of China and Japan. Fir-Flower Tablets, the 1921 anthology of renditions of
Chinese verse that Lowell produced in conjunction with her old schoolmate, Florence Wheelock Ayscough, acknowledges a
distant foremother: its title translates the name of the fine sheets of paper made by the most successful woman poet of Chinese
poetry's golden age, Xue Tao, whose best-known work includes superlative amatory verse. Lowell's search for new forms led
her to write English haiku. But despite its title and its debt to Japanese models, the late sequence "Twenty-Four Hokku on a
Modern Theme" reminds the reader once again of poems by nineteenth-century American women, as its lucid images mingle
sorrow, self-abnegation, and self-pity with moving declarations of adoration.
The variety of form, tone, and voice within the full range of Amy Lowell's work makes her impossible to pigeonhole with a
single convenient label such as Imagist. She strove to learn from many poets and to forge a new aesthetic for a new age. She
also strove to write each poem in whatever manner best suited it; often that manner was rooted in the lyrical and passionate
poetry of the immediate past.
Sara Teasdale is sometimes taken to be Amy Lowell's opposite: an unrebellious daughter to nineteenth-century poets in the
traditional feminine mode, a sentimental songbird warbling on in the new century. Indeed, in "A Critical Fable," Lowell
underlines the negative implications of that metaphor, describing Teasdale as "a little green linnet / Hung up in a cage," and
faults her for a range limited to one tone, "the reflex amatorial.'' Yet Lowell is quick to observe that Teasdale's "poetry succeeds,
in spite of fragility, / Because of her very remarkable agility." This "dainty erotic" is characterized as a skillful seducer of her
audience, who reveals to the careful reader "a primitive passion so nicely refined," then slips away, thus preserving her essential
autonomy. Although Lowell pokes at bit of fun at "Our love-poet, par excellence," she also places Teasdale squarely in a line of
descent from Lowell's own poetic foremothers, Sappho and Elizabeth Barrett Browningonly "Our Sara is bolder" than the latter,
"and feels quite at ease / As herself."
If Lowell's relationship to the female lyric tradition is stronger than most of her critics would have us see, Teasdale's is more
complex. Teasdale's work is charged with a deceptive air of spontaneity; it shines with a deceptively clear gloss. Butas her
notebooks and letters revealthe
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art and effort were in fact considerable. And the poems themselves remind us that the caged bird's song is not always a simple
one.
Teasdale achieved striking, subtle effects from metrical variations and from the use of varied line-length. But in the early years
of her poetic maturity she tuned her ear to the cadences of vers libre, and learned from the new way of writing a great deal about
word choice and the power of the image. From then on she occasionally chose to use a musically adept free verse.
Whatever the form, her lyrics focused on the expressionand examinationof human feeling. In a 1919 essay she states, "The poem
is written to free the poet from an emotional burden." Teasdale lived and wrote in a time of enormous social change, and her
poetry draws into question notions of the previous era about what was proper in women's livesespecially, emotional livesand
women's art.
In her own life, deftly though she managed it, that questioning was costly. Her biographers show that it was also unconscious or
quickly repressed, as Teasdale clung to appearances of the old order in the day of the New Woman. At age twenty-four, living
in her parents' home, she professed impatience with women who chose self-realization over self-sacrifice, off-handedly citing
the heroine of Ibsen's A Doll's House. But even in her earliest collect, on of poems, Teasdale writes to an exalted ideal lover, "I
bid you awake at dawn and discover / I have gone my way and left you free." For all that this departure is said to be a "gift" that
breaks the speaker's heart, the slam of the door as Nora leaves the doll's house in search of her own freedom seems to
echocontradictory and poignantbetween these lines.
Certainly Teasdale's description of the changing times into which the nineteenth-century British poet Christina Rossetti had been
born tells us something about both women: "Such changes are a strain on the individual called upon to undergo them. We
cannot live through one of the crucial acts of the drama of civilization without paying for the privilege." Teasdale's often painful
relations with menher tendency toward love relationships unrequited on one side or the other, and her evasive marriagshow
something of how she paid.
Teasdale defended sincere, direct self-expression as essential to true poetryand hid herself behind a variety of complex,
conflicting speakers who suggest a complex, conflicted self. "The finest utterance of women's hopes has been on love," she
wrote in the introduction for The Answering Voice (1917; revised edition, 1928), her anthology of love
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poems by women. Again and again the speaker of her poems is "crying after love" ("Spring Night," 1915), in lyrics that appear
intensely personal. Teasdale's first two books in particular (Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, published privately in 1907, and
Helen of Troy and Other Poems, 1911) contain many brief, skillful expressions of love-longing. Sometimes a poem appears to
accept the limitations assigned to women, as in "The Wanderer":
But what to me are north and south,
And what the lure of many lands,
Since you have leaned to catch my hands
And lay a kiss upon my mouth.
But often passion remains unrealized: "Loves come to-night to all the rest / But not to me." ("But Not to Me").
Even the early poems, however, reveal underlying tensions between sexuality and the chastity required by Victorian morality.
The very female image of the "velvet rose" in "A Maiden" evokes an intense, frustrated physical desire:
And since I am a maiden
My love will never know
That I could kiss him with a mouth
More red than roses blow.
The poem "Union Square" points out the cost of traditional feminine modesty, causing a sensation when Helen of Troy was
published. Though the poem's speaker claims to feel it is "well" that the man she loves "never leaned to hear / The words my
heart was calling," she cries out with envy of the streetwalkers who are able (in a naively glorified picture of a sex-worker's life)
to "ask for love," as she may not.
A sharp irony is also at work in "The Kiss," with its interrogation of the same romanticized notions she appears to express
uncritically elsewhere. After the speaker receives the kiss she hoped for, she becomes "like a stricken bird / That cannot reach
the south." What causes this wounding that prevents fulfillment? "His kiss was not so wonderful / as all the dreams I had," we
are toldand are left to wonder whether the hurt comes from the lover's inadequacy or from the idealization of romantic love as a
woman's one source of happiness. Indeed, the poem leaves open the question of whether the "dreams" were dreams of a
romance no real man could live up to or other dreams (like those of
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"The Wanderer," who in fact had "loved the green, bright north, / And . . . the cold, sweet sea") that must now be given up.
Many poems in Rivers to the Sea (1915) posit the conflict between romance and self quite distinctly. "I Am Not Yours" is
sometimes read as an example of the desire women were expected to have, to be "lost" in love. In fact, the poem quite
subversively asserts an individuality that continues despite that well-learned longing: "Yet I am I, who long to be / Lost as a
light is lost in light."
The title of another poem casts the struggle in disguised terms, "New Love and Old." But the true tension emerges at the end,
when the love now set aside is asked, "Shall I be faithless to myself / Or to you?" The answer to this dilemma could be almost
flippant, in a tone more usually associated with Millay, or even Dorothy Parker (18931967); in "Song," a lover is given distinct
demands:
You must love me gladly
Soul and body too,
Or else find a new love,
And good-bye to you.
Sometimes, in a more conventional manner, the resolution to the conflict between vulnerability and independence lies in death,
as in the beautiful lyric, "I Shall Not Care."
Teasdale's career was to explore this crucial tension many times, moving more and more often to the side of the self. "The
Crystal Gazer" (in Dark of the Moon, 1926) expresses the intent to "take my scattered selves and make them one." And the first
poem in the same book, "On the Sussex Downs," locates the source of poetic creativity quite clearly: "It was not you, though
you were near. . . . It was myself that sang in me."
The final sect, on of Flame and Shadow (1920) is titled "Songs for Myself." Although its first poem, "The Tree," begins, "Oh to
be free of myself," and although those following pick up the growing themes of age, disillusionment, and mortality, "Song
Making" tells us that the poet ''had to take my own cries / And thread them into a song"even though "the debt is terrible / That
must be paid." Teasdale never stopped making a personal and passionate art, however painful the process.
One alternative to the "terrible" price of self-awareness achieved through self-expression is silence, an alternative many women
have
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chosen. Teasdale examines this cultural expectation in a number of poems. In "From the Sea" (1915), a woman addresses a man
she adores, saying, "praise me for this, / That in some strange way I was strong enough / To keep my love unuttered." Yet her
first knowledge of her unattainable beloved came from the speaking-out of poetry: "all my singing had prefigured you.'' "Night
Song at Amalfi" (1915) more distinctly undermines the ideal of feminine reticence:
Oh, I could give him weeping,
Or I could give him song
But how can I give silence
My whole life long?
"What Do I Care" (1920) seems, however, to repudiate the effort to assert individuality through the lyrical expression of
emotion. Yet it does not choose self-effacement, it speaks of the greater strength of the mind, which is "a flint and a fire . . .
proud and strong," while the poet's songs are only "a fragrance" and "do not show me at all": the last line states, "It is my heart
that makes my songs, not I." But of course, in a rich and thought-provoking paradox, all this is set forth in the form of a song.
The idea of silence did attract Teasdale. She wrote (in "Those Who Love," 1926) of romantic heroines like Guinevere and Iseult,
"Those who love the most, / Do not talk of their love." Even her Sappho asserts (in Teasdale's 1915 poem "Sappho") that she
seeks at her life's end autonomy in a rest from making poetry: "I will not be a reed to hold the sound / Of whatsoever breath the
gods may blow, / Turning my torment into music for them." Again, the reader discovers a paradox, for of course this refusal is
expressed in seven pages of powerful blank verse. And what the world knows of Sappho it knows from her poetry. An earlier
poem to the Greek poet's daughter, "Cleis" (1911), reminds us that Cleis, too, was preserved in a poem. Teasdale knew the same
would be true of her; "Refuge" (1917) is but one of many houses "made of shining words, to be / My fragile immortality."
Teasdale continued to consider, in poetry, the value of keeping still. By 1926, when Dark of the Moon was published, Teasdale
could write, "I have less need now than when I was young / To share myself with every comer / Or shape my thoughts into
words with my tongue" ("The Solitary"). In her last book, Strange Victory (1933), Teasdale was to assert in one poem ("Age")
that silence is appropriate to "the sad wisdom of age."
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Teasdale's poetry ultimately subverted nineteenth-century ideas of feminine fulfillment in romantic love. The young dreamer of
the early poems came to learn that "the heart asks more than life can give" ("Moonlight," 1920). A few years later she advised,
"Take love when love is given, / But never think to find it / A sure escape from sorrow" ("Day's Ending," 1926). Yet in the book
she finished shortly before her death, Strange Victory, Teasdale indicates that some sort of comfort is possible. "Last Prelude''
suggests that the longed-for release from painful separateness that romantic love did not provide could come in the upward rush
of "melody," in poetic inspiration. And in "Secret Treasure" the poet declares the value both of lyrical art and of autonomy
within the mind, telling us that even when no poems took shape in actual words, she found "unencumbered loveliness" in "a
hidden music in my brain."
Elinor Wylie, like Teasdale, found a balm in the making of art and in the life of the mind. She too was well aware of the
dangers to a woman in her society who expressed her passions, in life as well as poetry. And she too carried on nineteenthcentury traditions of feminine lyricism; her strong, supple verse made skillful use of rhyme and metrical variation as it dealt with
emotions made problematic by pressures toward silence and inhibition.
But unlike her contemporary, Wylie broke the rules of conventional propriety. She left her mentally ill first husband (and her
young son) to live with Horace Wylie, the married man who would become her second husband only after years of social
censure. Her relationship with the writer William Rose Benét was openly acknowledged well before she divorced Horace and
married Benét. In the last two years of her life Wylie devoted much of her emotionaland artisticenergy to a married Englishman
who avoided a sexual involvement. Her poem "Silver Bells and Cockle Shells," first published fifteen years after her death in
Last Poems of Elinor Wylie (1943), asks whether she fled from each of the three marriages for love of flight itself, or because
each time there was "something" she had to "flee to find."
Wylie valued self-fulfillment over the dictates of society, but she knew the cost of doing so. Her first book of poems (Incidental
Numbers, privately printed in 1911) includes a poem on "Eve in Heaven" dated four months after Elinor and Horace ran off
together. Shunned by angels, scorned by saints, and decried by the damned for her sin of sex-
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ual love, Eve does not flinch but smiles. She pities the Virgin Mary who "was never there . . . poor soul!"
Wylie wrote of hard-won strength. In "Let No Charitable Hope" (Black Armour, 1923), we are told:
I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
Solitary and beleaguered by restrictions placed upon her gender, this speaker takes what she needs from life. The poem closes
with another wry and fearless smile.
On the verge of adulthood, however, Wylie chose to conform. The loving memoir written by her younger sister, Nancy Hoyt,
tells us that in her late teens the poet "was passionately interested in her school work," preferring study to parties and flirtation;
her teachers "wished her to become a college graduate, or even a lady professor." Instead, young Elinor entered the round of
dances and dressmakers prescribed for a debutante. In doing so, she chose a strategy that was to become the subject and the
manner of much of her art: she chose the protection of artifice, and hid her true self away. Nancy Hoyt reports that the glittering
dresses Wylie favored later were, to her, "coats of mail, armor against the world when she would put them on."
Beautiful constructs and artful facades made fine hiding-places for this vulnerable female poet. "You would shoot nightingales,"
Wylie wrote to Benét before their marriage. "Only of course they are clever about hiding" (from an unpublished letter cited by
William Drake in The First Wave). In a late poem "To a Lady's Countenance" (Angels and Earthly Creatures, 1929), Wylie
writes of a face as coolly alluring as her own, calling it a "silly mask." Wylie was famous for her elegant beautyand frowned
upon for the pride she took in it. Yet the countenance, "arranged with coquetry and grace,'' is said to be a "veil concealing
sorrow's face."
Despite the eagerly circulated stories about Wylie's love of the spotlight, she was quite capable of criticizing herself. A poem
first published anonymously in the New Yorker ("Portrait in Black Paint, with a Very Sparing Use of Whitewash") pokes fun at
her own pretensions, including the "false impression that she's pretty." Light though the poem is, it appears heartfelt when it
articulates the conflict between
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developing an appealing appearance and developing the intellect: "Her mind might bloom, she might reform the world / In those
lost hours while her hair is curled." As the English novelist Edith Oliver remembered Wylie, "She loved beauty . . . created it;in
her person and her surroundings, as well as her writing. It was, in a sense, the passion of her life."
Or perhaps Wylie found protection from passion in a chill, polished presence. "Firth of Forth," a ballad left unfinished at her
death, describes a brave and regal woman, whose posture and auburn hair suggest Wylie's own:
O she was fair, or fair enough,
Her body was straight as a new-cut lance;
Her heart was armoured by the stuff
That's iron to mischance.
Feeling is dangerous: Wylie does not excise it from her work, as androcentric Modernist poetic orthodoxy would have had her
do, but she proclaims that truth. "From the Wall" advises, "Woman, be steel against loving, enfold and defend you, / . . . Lock
up your heart like a jewel . . . / be iron, be stone." The poem, first published in 1943, was written during the time she was
leaving her second husband for William Benét; Benét described it as "bitterly realistic."
As Cheryl Walker has pointed out, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women often expressed in their poetry a sense
that sex was something brutish, to be transcended in favor of the purer passions of artistic sensibility. Wylie responded similarly
to the vulnerability accompanying sexual love. Her first commercially published book, Nets to Catch the Wind (1921), begins
with a poem on "Beauty": it is "neither good nor bad, / But innocent and wild!" Yet she casts her own celebration of beauty in
terms of conflicts over womanly erotic feeling expressed by other women poets; beauty is depicted as female, it "consumes her
like a curse" to be called "wicked'' (as Wylie was), and "too much" love kills her "who had / the hard heart" of a prepubescent
child.
Wylie's physical experiences with men evidently were of a "violence of lust." In another posthumously published poem, "The
Persian Kitten" lies down between two lovers in bed, enforcing restraint as it separates them "like a sword." Trivial Breath
(1928) includes a "Confession of Faith": as the speaker lies "alone / By the beloved one," she tries to "erect defence / Against
love's violence"; a lover cannot be a friend. In
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"The Puritan's Ballad," a woman tells how she feared the inhuman and "dreadful" strength of a young man's arms, and how
when the couple yielded to desire, "We were no longer friend and friend, / But only lover and lover." The solution offered a few
pages later is to "retreat'' emotionally from physical love: the poem "Where, O Where?" ends, "each night I hide / In your bed,
at your side." Yet Wylie evidently took no pride in whatever led her (in the words of the first of the three "Subversive Sonnets"
published after her death) "to keep myself unto myself/ To lock the door," declaring her refusal of her lovers not "holy chastity"
but "mere . . . old-maidishness."
The body, then, was for Wylie a source of unhappiness. Black Armour opens with a poem, "Full Moon," in which the self is a
spirit caged inside the body, and feels "the clean bones crying in the flesh." A few pages later, "Epitaph" describes a woman
made more beautiful "in coldest crucibles of pain," something about which Wylie's intense headaches taught her a great deal.
This woman is purified, made more beautiful andinterestingly"more desired" by her agonies, but her end lies in the grave.
Wylie's popular "Hymn to Earth" (1929) uses elevated language, refined thought, and powerful images to make new the old
knowledge that the body is "clay" and "dust." "Chimera Sleeping" in the same volume reminds us, however, that "beauty's pure
pathetic shape" is born of mortality; it is "the honey breath / Issuing from the jaws of death." This strange creature of the
imagination, the chimera, with its "cold transparent flesh," has both gained and lost in its refinement away from "fear and grief"
and "love."
Wylie often sought a solution to the problems attendant upon life in the body by attempting to move beyond the realm of the
senses. Her poems tell us she is a "Puritan" who favors "Bare hills, cold silver . . . / . . . skies . . . snowy gray / . . . And sleepy
winter" ("Wild Peaches"). Images of coldness and colorlessness pervade her work, including such well-known lyrics as "Velvet
Shoes" and "Silver Filigree" (all 1921). A poem that appeared in Poetry magazine seven months before she died reminds us of
the social pressures that encouraged this self-presentation. Addressing "The Heart Upon the Sleeve," the poet says, "They take
you for . . . a stain / Of vanity and pride," when in fact her sleeve also bears "invisible" drops of tearlike "transparent blood": to
lose the red of passion is to be protected by disguise.
It is not only a negative view of sexuality that links Wylie to the association of love and anguish in the work of nineteenthcentury female
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lyricists. Her great sonnet sequence "One Person" (in Angels and Earthly Creatures) beautifully exploresas Teasdale also didthe
emotions surrounding a love that must remain unexpressed. The sequence praises the man Wylie loved late in her life, using the
self-deprecatory posture traditional both to the sonnets of the Renaissance and to the love poems of later women.
Yet Wylie's art and thought are grounded in something more profound than an unawakened sexuality or an unexamined
parroting of conventional feminine attitudes toward romance. Just as she learned fromand grew beyondthe turn-of-the-century
Aestheticist movement, so she expresses in the "One Person" sequence the philosophical culmination of her long concern with
the body's painful failures and the possibility of intellectual and spiritual communion. The poems exemplify what Louise Bogan
was to call (in a 1947 essay) "Wylie's ability to fuse thought and passion into the most admirable and complex forms." They
acknowledge the limitations set as much by time or her own psyche as by her beloved's refusal to enter into an adulterous affair.
Sonnet 6 tells him:
I have believed me obdurante and blind
To those sharp ecstasies the pulses give:
The clever body five times sensitive
I never have discovered to be kind
As the poor soul . . .
In fact, the sestet goes on to declare that the "miracle" of the speaker's love is ultimately beyond the ken of soul and body both.
The resolution of many tensionseros and transcendence, sad frustration and triumphant contentment, mortality and love that
outlasts deathcomes in the splendid final poem. It speaks of a desire beyond denial or the grievous knowledge of human "doom,"
ending "let us . . . touch each other's hands, and turn / Upon a bed of juniper and fern" (Sonnet 18). In the mingling of sharp
fragrant evergreens and feathery short-lived ferns, the spiritual and the sensuous conjoin; the poet achieves an acceptance of
physicality, at least in the realm of the imagination.
This delicate, powerful coming-to-terms is not unprecedented in Wylie's work. It is the body that makes language, and so makes
the poetry through which spirit and feeling can be articulated:
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The only engine which can fabricate
Language from spirit is the heart of each:
Industrious blood has braided into speech
The airy filiments of love and hate.
("A Red Carpet for Shelley, II" 1928)
She who devoted herself to creating art as "pure" and "far removed" from earth as the moon reminds us in "To a Book" (1928)
that the ''roots" of poetry are nonetheless sunk in "this inferior substance" that gave it birthflesh not only mortal but undeniably
female: "you are mine, and I was worthy / To suckle you, as very woman."
In the end the poet must be true to herself and her own "nature." The "Love Song" that follows the sonnet sequence in Angels
and Earthly Creatures asserts this: she bids farewell to her beloved and to her "weeping," proclaiming, "I set that archangel /
The depths of heaven above you." This exalted figure can only be the long-dead man Wylie identified with and greatly loved:
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Figures based on Shelley are central to two of her four novels, and to a fifth, left uncompleted at her
death. The scholarly side repressed in Wylie's youth reemerged when she reached maturity and undertook a serious, wideranging
study of Shelley's life and works. In this disembodied Romantic poet Wylie found a passion that did not endanger her autonomy
but gave her inspiration and sustained her lyric strength
Wylie's early death was a great personal loss for Edna St. Vincent Millay, one that inspired moving elegiac poems. A gifted
female lyricist had been "shaken from the bough, and the pure song half-way through" ("Over the Hollow Land," 1939). Like
Wylie, Millay made poetry for the modern age in new renditions of time-honored modes and dared to conduct her personal life
by her own rules. After the League of American Penwomen rejected Wylie on the grounds of immoral behavior, Millay wrote to
them, "I too am eligible for your disesteem. Strike me too from your lists, and permit me, I beg you, to share with Elinor Wylie
a brilliant exile from your fusty province." The disdain for petty-mindedness, the proud commitment to her ideals, the generosity
of spirit, and the well-honed edge of her words: these are characteristic of Millay.
For Louise Bogan in 1939 Millay's characteristics included "magnanimity of nature" and "a strange mixture of maturity and
unresolved
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youth," including "childish fears of death and . . . charming rebellions against facts." The negative critique, of course, reveals as
much about Bogan as about her subject; it is also representative of Millay's fall from high critical regard as a brilliant lyricist
with thoroughly modern attitudes toward life and love. Bogan's final assessment, in 1951, is equally telling. Just before praising
Wylie's "mature emotional richness," she chides Millay for excessive emotionality. But Bogan ungrudgingly acknowledges
Millay's outstanding gift for writing in the lyrical manner of John Keats, praising her best work for cutting "into the center of
complicated emotion."
Artful tapestries emerge from these knots of feeling sliced open by Millay's words, as text after text is woven from them and the
reader discovers how each poem is made more complex by the varied stances and voices of the others. In assembling a shifting
succession of poetic speakers Millay became something more than the literary or emotional quick-change artist some have seen
her as. There may be safety, even freedom, for an imperiled self protected by many masks, or the reader may be led to recognize
the fluidity of a psychological subject constructed of just such verbal guises.
The high tradition of the English sonnet gave Millay, in the words of one of her most famous poems, a "golden vessel of great
song" into which passion could be poured, preserving it within a single shape, and making it possible to take in (1923). This
tradition provided her with a gleamingif not always fashionablevocabulary of images, syntax, and diction; the poet also used
contemporary colloquialisms, enriching her work with deft counterpoints of classicism and modernity in language as in content.
"I can make / Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!" Millay wrote in an early long poem ("Interim," written before the
spring of 1912 and published in her first book, Renascence and Other Poems, in 1917). This exercise in dramatic blank verse
covertly celebrates the young woman's entry into the male-dominated realm of poetry, even as it notes poetry's limitations. It
also recognizes a disruptive potential in feeling, asking, "O little words, how can you run so straight / Across the page, beneath
the weight you bear?"
The generative tension between restraint and self-expression, so powerful in the work of other nineteenth-and twentieth-century
female poets, concerned Millay throughout her life. "I will put Chaos
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into fourteen lines," she wrote in a poem that appears in the posthumous collection, Mine the Harvest (1954). But enjambment
undercuts any simplistic concept of mastering energy through artistic form: "and let him thence escape / If he be lucky." This
hint that excessive restraint diminishes vitality is underlined when the forced mingling of Chaos and Order is described as a
"pious rape" of Chaos by the poet; there is something "not yet understood" in the passion that the form claims to control.
Formal verse is one of many means of self-protection to be found among the methods of Millay's art. As Jane Stanbrough has
pointed out (in an essay in Shakespeare's Sisters), the poet's frequent images of suffocation, confinement, and victimizationoften
expressed in gender-specific termsreveal the risks and damages to women in patriarchal society. Light-hearted celebrations of
independence in such famous poems as "Thursday" ("I loved you Wednesday,yesbut what / Is that to me?," 1920) tell only a
part of the tale.
Millay's use of the sonnet links her to a long tradition of masculine views of women and romantic love. She could make capable
use of male personae, just as she often wrote of love in the terms of sorrow and longing articulated by nineteenth-century
American women. She also (as in the sonnet beginning "Love is not blind," 1923) wrote of love for a female figure from the
viewpoint of an "I" not gender-marked; Anne Cheney's 1975 biography discusses Millay's transition in her twenties from a
lesbian (or bisexual) orientation to a heterosexual one. It is the variety of perspectives, tones, and moods that allows Millay's
poetry to voice complexities of sensibility no single attitude or poetic idiom could catch.
Millay wrote many poems debunking sentimental concepts of women and love. Lake the sexual activity of her Greenwich
Village days, this allowed her to shatter the code of feminine decorum that caught up Teasdale and Wylie. Some readers see this
as a successful defiance, others as an enactment of male-identified values similar to her use of a masculine
nickname"Vincent"and pronouns; Millay was not the only woman of the Jazz Age to express her new freedoms through her
sexuality or by equating autonomy with conventionally masculine traits.
Emily Stipes Watts links Millay's blithe air of sophistication to earlier women such as Frances Sargent Locke Osgood
(18111850), a suc-
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cessful poet who wrote lines like: "My task must be now, to endure him! / Heighho! but I've caught him at last!" It is not far
from Osgood's poem to Millay's "Daphne" (1920), which concludes, "to heel, Apollo!" or from there to such audacious sonnets
as "I shall forget you presently, my dear" (1920) or the one ending ''I find this frenzy insufficient reason / For conversation
when we meet again" (1923).
The situation, however, is hardly one of simple hedonism. The last poem mentioned begins, "I, being born a woman and
distressed / by all the needs and notions of my kind," subtly reminding us that desire consists of socially constructed "notions"
as well as physiological "needs"; it portrays the body's erotic responses as "the poor treason / Of my stout blood against my
staggering brain."
The well-known sonnet sequence Fatal Interview (1931) offers many examples of the striking originality of Millay's adept
enunciations of conventionaland unconventionalfeminine attitudes toward love. "Women have loved before as I love now,"
number 26 begins. The speaker compares herself to Helen of Troy, Isolde, and other "Heedless and willful" women who gave
themselves up to love, despite the price, but she claims that "of all alive / I only in such utter, ancient way / Do suffer love." The
old way had a tragic grandeur, she says, but it was self-destructive; women's emotional lives have changed.
Inspired by her affair with the younger poet George Dillon, the sequence treats the nineteenth-century female lyricists' theme of
forbidden love. Millay and her husband Eugene Boissevain maintained an ideal of openness to sexual relationships outside
marriage, but the second sonnet sets forth powerfully mixed feelings. Desire is as compelling here, and as dangerous to the
female speaker, as in any high-pitched amatory poem. Yet she knows "the wound will heal, the fever will abate"and knows, too,
what she's learned from living with a new sexual ethic, that "the scar of this encounter like a sword / Will lie between me and
my troubled lord." The reader is left to decide which is sword-like (phallic, painful, distancing), the aftereffects of an
extramarital involvement or the lovers' encounter itself.
Millay's realistic views of female experience acknowledged the force of romantic love even as she resisted that "bitter crust."
The close of one sonnet from The Harp-Weaver (1923) blends a defiant pride with the time-worn idea of painful thralldom to
the beloved: "But if I suffer, it is my own affair." A free-verse poem in the same volume firmly if reas-
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suringly asserts the speaker's need for independent action. On her way to "The Concert," she explains:
Why may you not come with me?
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.
On her return from a disembodied and solitary immersion in the music she will be "a little taller / Than when I went."
Another aspect of this realism was Millay's conscious commitment to feminism and her pleasure in the successes of the suffrage
movement and other women poets. Responding to a declaration by the poets Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Byner that the
Transcendentalist vision of her award-winning poem "Renascence" had to be the work of a "brawny male" and not a "sweet
young thing," the slightly built twenty-year-old wrote them a letter asking, "Is it that you consider brain and brawn so
inseparable?I have thought otherwise." The arch tone of such early letters modulates to an amused understanding of gender roles
in a witty sonnet ("Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!'' 1923) that responds to a man's condescension with scorn for one so
easily manipulated. Since he will not acknowledge their intellectual equality, the speaker will play the role of the coquette,
"sweet and crafty, soft and sly"until she walks out on him. She will act as women have been supposed to, but in fact that acting,
and her intellect, put her in control.
Biographers attribute Millay's awareness, and her assurance, to the loving, gynocentric world in which her independent-minded
divorced mother raised Edna and her two younger sisters. "You brought me up in the tradition of poetry," Millay wrote her
"Dearly Beloved" mother in 1921, "and everything I did you encouraged"; in a posthumously published untitled poem, the
poetworn down by illness, persistent pain, chemical dependency, and grief for the deadpraised Cora Buzzelle Millay's courage as
"Rock from New England quarried," and told of her own need for her mother's legacy.
In later years Millay often turned from musical self-expression to write more overtly political poetryfor example, poems for the
executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, sonnets on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Spanish
Civil War, a long closet drama called Conversation at Midnight (1937) analyzing economic,
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political, ethical, and religious questions, and, as World War II developed, much work aimed at molding opinion in the United
States, some of which was read over the radio as part of the war effort. Her growing focus on social issues and her increasing
expressions of anguish in the face of human flaws, like her expanding poetic exploration of the natural world, have frustrated
readers who are charmedor profoundly movedby the poems on which Millay established her early reputation. Some critiques of
her later works weakness are deserved, but they arise in part from the breaking of expectations based on Millay's captivating and
finely crafted love poemsor on her gender.
Yet Millay's skillful construction of her tapestries of feeling places poems from every decade of her life among the finest in the
language. In 1912 an unknown young woman created a literary sensation with "Renascence," expressing a mystical experience in
terms derived from the feminine singers of the previous era: "My anguished spirit, like a bird, / Beating against my lips I heard."
In 1923 she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. By 1941 she had become the renowned public poet,
despite increasing negative responses from the critics, writing, in a high-flown occasional "Invocation to the Muses"
unpublished in her lifetime,
If I address thee in archaic style . . .
It is that for a little while
The heart must, oh, indeed must from this angry and utrageous present
Itself withdraw.
Through all the changes, however, Millay remained the woman who wrote in "The Dragonfly" (1923), "Men behold me . . .
Walled in an iron house of silky singing." But the unformed pupa hidden behind lyrical bulwarks transforms within its self-made
chrysalis to emerge with "brazen wing," to rise above the seed-filled touch-me-nots and pink flowers of the procreative realm,
''Free of these and making a song of them."
Millay's 1920 poem "The Singing-Woman from the Wood's Edge" takes a spirited look at her culture's view of the woman poet
as a hybrid oddity. This female music-maker is cheerfully contemptuous of her father, a repressive patriarchal priest who did at
least teach her the high language of psalms and classical learning; she sides with her mother, an
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unrestrained, sensuous creature of nature and weaver of magic webs. The singing-woman cannot imagine herself as anything but
what she is, "a prophet and a liar"in other words, a poet in the mainstream of the Western tradition.
For Louise Bogan, the resolution of what her society defined as a dissonant combination, "woman" and "poet," was not so easy.
Her strategies for psychological survival and aesthetic success included a discriminating use of restrictions in the form and
content of her poetry. She found in intellectual and verbal rigor a way to assert her artistic gifts, one that conveys a transformed
version of the inhibition often required of female poets. The results included compelling, tightly disciplined poems on the
disturbing topic of womanly emotionalitymetrical and free-verse lyrics that display an unsurpassed sense of the music of the
English language.
Biographers point out that Bogan's observations of her parents' turbulent relationships and her mother's extramarital affairs must
have taught her early on to distrust unrestrained emotions. Yet young Louise also associated her mother with beauty, talent, and
vitality. As late as 1962, in a lecture that carries forward her growing pride in the artistic achievements of women, Bogan
counsels that women writers "must not lie . . . whine . . . attitudinize . . . theatricalize . . . nor coarsen their truths." She
particularly denounced both "the role of the femme fatale" and ''little girlishness."
Bogan's striving for a controlled impersonalityuntainted by stock feminine poses or sentimental excesswas, of course, grounded
in more than the circumstances of her childhood, two difficult marriages, or the painful love affairs of her early twenties. It was
a carefully developed aesthetic position, an aspect of male Modernist doctrine that she assimilated and bent to her own purposes.
Although the volume of Bogan's work was reduced by her self-imposed limitations, her critical principles enabled her to make
enduring art.
Born almost a quarter-century after Lowell, Bogan reached maturity not with, but slightly after, a major feminist efflorescence
in politics and literature. In the fall of 1923, when her first volume of poetry appeared, she was featured in Vanity Fair as one of
the youngest "Distinguished American Women Poets Who Have Made the Lyric Verse Written by Women in America More
Interesting Than That of Men." But her association there with Lowell, Millay, Teasdale, Wylie, and
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other literary woman was a far more positive thing than it came to be for critics in subsequent decades.
The reassertion of dominance by male Modernists (and their critical followers) analyzed by Gilbert and Gubar in No Man's Land
had much to do with the revolt against the self-expressive poetry of the female lyricists. A similar anxiety may have brought
about Bogan's insistence on women's limitations. Perhaps she described herself when she said in 1962, "The blows dealt women
by social and religious change were real, and in certain times and places definitely maiming." Her next sentence seems to pick
its way through territory mined with psychological peril, asserting that woman is "not the opposite or the 'equal' (or the rival) of
man, but man's complement." And women's art, she felt, must accord with what she saw as women's nature.
As Bogan's place in the canon of modern poetry grows more secure, it is important not to forget the effect upon her work of the
female lyricist tradition about which she felt such ambivalence. When musical verse with the appearance at least of direct and
simple self-expression went out of style during the 1930s, she dissociated herself (in the words of a 1938 essay quoted by
Jaqueline Ridgeway) from its potential excesses of "bathos" and "limpness" of form even as she reminded her readers of the
"high tension" at work in the best such poems. She also hinted at the role of gender in fashion's swing, noting the "ridicule" and
"contempt'' being directed toward "Female lyric grief."
In her late teens Bogan read Teasdale, Guiney, Reese, and other women skilled at expressing feeling tempered by highly
polished formsand learned much from them. Yet she needed to differentiate herself. The poem "My Voice Not Being Proud," in
her first book (Body of this Death, 1923), claims a poetic voice not "like a strong woman's, that cries / Imperiously aloud." The
intricate rhyme scheme of the poem reins in every end-word but the headstrong "cries." In fact, however, the voice is certainly
strong, and quietly proud.
Like Teasdale and Millay, moreover, Bogan develops the heritage of nineteenth-century women's poetry by voicing a critique of
romantic love. In "Knowledge" (1923) she echoes the previous era's association of love and death in terms of present-day
disillusionment: "passion warms little / of flesh in the mould." "The Changed Woman" (1923) "relearns" the nineteenth-century
lesson that ardor brings woundsand the twentieth-century lesson that "the wound heals over." But, we're
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told, this woman will ultimately yield again to the "unwise, heady" and seductive force "ever denied and driven"; readers are
invited to reexamine the title with all the skepticism of the new age. "Girl's Song" (1929) similarly unites with the familiar
theme of springtime love-sorrow, a modern worldly awareness that ''another maiden" will fall for the faithless lover.
Bogan's poetry makes clear the price for women of the old myths of romanceand the new myths of her own Greenwich Village
experiments in free love. She expresses compassion for those who have lived by both versions of vulnerability to the passions,
even as she wryly reproves their foolishness. "Chanson Un Peu Naive" (1923) releases a radiant scattershot of ironies, aimed at
the female experience of sex, at those who intend to escape the near-death it brings (physically, in orgasm or childbirth, as well
as emotionally, in betrayal), at those who believe lovers' lies even while they utter them, at those like the young Millay who
make the "pretty boast" of liberation, at those who fail to recognize that pain's warning signal may make it one's truest friend,
and at thoseincluding of course herselfwho fashion poetry from all this.
Nevertheless, formal verse seemed necessary to Bogan to handle risky emotions. A 1948 letter states that the "burden of feeling"
(the phrase echoes Teasdale's 1919 essay) is best taken up "instantly" by a practiced poetic technique (Bogan's emphasis). In
"Single Sonnet" (Sleeping Fury, 1937) the poet calls on the "heroic mold" of the poem's structure to "take up, as it were lead or
gold / The burden." Feeling is described as a "dreadful mass" that cannot be lifted from its torpor without "Staunch meter";
Ridgeway notes that the typescript of the poem indicates it was written at Cromwell Hall, the sanitarium where Bogan received
treatment in 1931.
Bogan's early poem, "Sub Contra" (1923), expresses the tension between upwelling emotion and its containment in poetry. The
title suggests that a lyric begins in resonant tones almost beneath the threshold of hearing, building from delicate tremors to "one
note rage can understand." The poet invokes sounds rooted in the heart, which rouse the mindas well as craft, which brings what
is "riven" into the harmony of a chord. The poem, however, snaps shut with a warning against excess control. The final rhymed
iambic tetrameter couplet plays off against the previous loosely cadenced stresses and subtle echo-
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ings (the preceding rhymes have run abcdefcedbaf) as it calls for freedom from rigidity"for every passions sake."
Thus Bogan carries on her argument against the overwrought thrill her poetic mothers were accused of and against the neurotic
deadening of sensibility of the backlash. The formal poem without "life" provided by feeling is a lackluster thing, like an
artificial "Homunculus" (1937). The homunculus-poem, not engendered in ardent procreation but constructed in a learned
alchemist's fleshless flask, "lacks . . . Some kernel of hot endeavor," a hazardous but essential source of bodilyperhaps
specifically femaleenergy. In her pivotal 1947 essay "The Heart and the Lyre'' Bogan wrote of the "impoverishment" that would
result from an abandonment by women of emotionality "because of contemporary pressures or mistaken self-consciousness."
Written after years of analysis and introspection, one of Bogan's rare last poems ("Little Lobelia's Song," 1968) was to recognize
a further danger of repression: how speechless rage at abandonment sours into sleeplessness, depression, and tears.
Dangerous though it may seem, then, Bogan joins her foremothers in declaring passion essential to poetry. And she too found an
empowerment in the making of verbal music. The title of her "Song for a Slight Voice" (Dark Summer, 1929) alludes ironically
to the notion of an unassertive songstress, but the speaker warns:
If ever I render back your heart
So long to me delight and plunder,
It will be bound with the firm strings
That men have built the viol under.
Clearly, the singer, and the energetic rhythms of her song, have considerable ability to control.
Music, born of the emotions and needed as protection from the hurt they can bring, is in Bogan's view something as greatly to be
desired as sexual release. "Musician" (Poems and New Poems, 1941) uses the rhyme scheme of a modified Shakespearean
sonnet on short lines individually modulated to embody meaning through rhythm. An erotic yearning charges the descriptions of
the music-maker's hands. But the much-desired plucking of stringslike the relief of poetic inspirationhas been long delayed. In
light of the artistic silences of Bogan's later years these warnings seem prophetic.
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Studies by Elizabeth Frank and Gloria Bowles, among others, have recently joined the volumes edited by Martha Collins and
Ruth Limmer in elucidating Bogan's life and work. Many aspects of her art have received critical noticeher remarkable use of
myth, her compelling explorations of the unconscious, her deep concern with mutability and the human condition, her relation to
the Romantic as well as the Symbolist and High Modernist aesthetics. Yet no one aspect seems more essential to our
understanding of that art than its grounding in the body: the body that pulses, hears, and sings. "The Alchemist" (1923) speaks
of how flesh "still / Passionate" and oddly "unmysterious," outlasts all efforts of will and mind to refine it away. "You may have
all things from me,'' a woman says to a lover in "Fifteenth Farewell" (1923), "save my breath." The first of these two intricately
crafted Petrarchan sonnets finds in that "slight life in my throat . . . / . . . Close to my plunging blood," the inbreathing and
outflow from which the lyric poem is born. This very physical thing is stronger than heart's pain or the rift between emotions
and intellect, the divided "breast and mind."
Bogan seemed intensely aware that her body was a female one. Frustrated when her work was treated by critics in round-up
reviews of recent books by women, she struggled with assimilated misogynist attitudes of her times. In a letter written two
months before her fortieth birthday the only woman she lists among the nine examples of "oddly assorted authors" she read in
her formative years is the British lyric poet Alice Meynell (18471922), although in fact there were a number of others. She
describes "what I did and what I felt" then as "sui generis." Yet unique though she was, she came to know her parentageher
mothers and her fathers both. Bogan spoke human truths that transcend the channels formed by gender, but she spoke with a
profound awareness of gender's molding force on the experience and the expression of those truths.
Jeanne Larsen
Further Reading
Bogan, Louise. Achievement in American Poetry, 19001950. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951.
The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 19231968. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.
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Drake, William. The First Wave: Women Poets in America, 19151945. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Lowell, Amy. Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Collected Poems. Ed. Norma Millay. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.
Teasdale, Sara. The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale. New York: Macmillan, 1937.
Walker, Cheryl. Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern American Women Poets.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977.
Wylie, Elinor. Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie. New York: Knopf, 1932.
Last Poems of Elinor Wylie. New York: Knopf, 1943.
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Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernisn
"I always wanted to be historical," Gertrude Stein said, and she always was. She was at the center of the avant-garde art and
literary worlds in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, a friend of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse as well as Ernest
Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. Nonetheless, she has not figured prominently in the literary history of poetic Modernism,
nor have other women Modernists such as H.D. and Marianne Moore who were equally active in the literary circles of London
and New York where they lived. Although these women poets were productive writers, often friends and even editors and
reviewers of the so-called High Modernists who have come to dominate accounts of the movement, they themselves have been
largely neglected figures in the conventional literary histories, for a variety of reasons.
Chief among the reasons for this exclusion has been the critically generated misperception that Modernism did not develop from
the work of the women poets. Stein's radical experimentation has remained unassimilated to the movement, divided, as it has
been conventionally, into the two strands of Imagism and Symbolism. Her poetry, growing out of her scientific training and her
interest in experimental painting as well as her own experience, ranged in new and different directions toward both exactitude
and nonreferentiality, maintaining a constant interest in experimentation. In contrast to the marginal status of Stein, H.D. has
been granted such a central position in the short-lived Imagist movement that the full range of her interests has been easily dis-
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counted, and her development even within Imagism has been traced largely through the limited view of its first publicist, Ezra
Pound. Finally, Marianne Moore's syllabic verse has appeared to be merely idiosyncratic and without any acknowledged
influences, although recent examinations of the works of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath have begun to correct that
impression and to argue for her significance to these poets, at least.
Another reason for excluding these women from literary history, again both effect and cause, is the fact that, until recently, their
work was not readily accessible. Much of Stein's poetry was published posthumously in an expensive edition. Marianne Moore's
constant revision of her poetry has made it difficult to establish her texts. However, with the publication of the Selected Writings
of Gertrude Stein (1962), The Yale Gertrude Stein (1980), H.D.: Collected Poems: 19121944 (1983), and The Complete Poems
of Marianne Moore (1967), the work of these poets is now more easily obtainable, although even now their complete works are
available only in archives.
Behind these acknowledged reasons for overlooking women poets in the history of Modernism is a blindness to the experience
in and of their poetry. When their contemporary poets, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens,
praised their work, they recognized it not for its unique and different properties but for the ways in which it most resembled
their own work. Thus, for example, Marianne Moore was valued by Richard Aldington as an Imagist; by Pound for her
"logopoeia," by Stevens for her new romanticism, by Eliot for her classicism, and by Williams for cleaning up the language. In
all these valuations Moore is made to seem a disciple rather than an original genius. More recently, literary historians such as
David Perkins, M. L. Rosenthal, and Albert Gelpi have followed the same strategy, including the women Modernists only as
they fit into an understanding of the movement dominated by the men.
Simply inserting these women poets into the movement, although it will provide a broader conception of Modernism than we
now have, will not offer a better understanding of their work unless they are considered not as adjuncts to the men but as
original experimental writers on their own terms. They are distinctly different from the men, who were themselves
experimenting against the sentimentality of Victorian poetry. These women shared this antipathy to sentimentality but did not
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often share the positions of their male contemporaries, whose experimental forms often masked conservativeeven
reactionaryattitudes toward women, society, and politics, and whose interests in myth and history excluded women. The women
were in some ways more radical in their literary experiments as well as their social and political views.
In this double rebellion, then, and writing in a tradition with no easily identifiable immediate female predecessors, these women
were both extremely free from restraints to experimentation and at the same time susceptible to a strange inhibition of
expression. Stein and H.D. felt restricted at first from the full expression of their erotic experience. Although they wrote some of
the most original love poetry of their generation, they worked toward it tentatively, first writing in a language coded to conceal
their subject and in a hermetic style. Moore's reticence had other sources in her temperament, her upbringing, and her
experience. She too began to write in elaborate formal structures that restrained rather than released expression. The surface
difficulty of the texts of these three poets, unlike the difficulties of their male contemporaries, derives from both the boldness of
their experimentation and their hesitant search for a way to express their own way of seeing. Theirs was a doubled experimental
writingexperimenting within an experimental movement.
Nonetheless, Gertrude Stein's early "portraits" (1912), H.D.'s early prose poem, Notes on Thought and Vision (1919), and
Marianne Moore's second volume of poetry, Observations (1924), all indicate the importance of their roles as spectators, looking
from the position of the woman, and the extent to which they wanted to differentiate their way of seeing from that of all others.
The positions from which they look are quite different from each other, and yet they are united in their interests in an
experimental writing that derives from a new way of seeing, a new opening of the perceiving subject.
A closer examination of these three writers will indicate how fully their ways of looking are figured in the metaphor of
childbirth and maternity. Although only H.D. was actually a mother (and an indifferent one at that), these women poets all found
that they could use the woman's unique experience of procreation as a metaphor for not just literary creation but their ways of
looking. The female body, as a place of growth and of both separation and attachment, provides the literal figure for Stein's
early portraits, for H.D.'s vision, and for Moore's obser-
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vations. The metaphor is not new; both men and women poets, from Philip Sidney and Anne Bradstreet to the present day, have
used it. What is surprising is the use these women poets could find for the metaphor in a period when the female body was
either negated or appropriated as other, abject, defiled.
Gertrude Stein wrote, "The literature of a hundred years ago is perfectly easy to see, because the sediment of ugliness has
settled down and you get the solemnity of its beauty. But to a person of my temperament, it is much more amusing when it has
the vitality of the struggle." Although it has now been almost a hundred years since Stein began to write, she has still not found
her place in the literary history of the Modernist movement in American poetry. She has had to wait for the development of a
fully responsive criticism. If in poststructuralism and French feminist theory Stein's work has now found that critical response,
neither of these approaches attempts to place the work in literary history. As a result, Stein might still be amused by the ongoing
struggle to locate her in the emergence of Modernism.
Only recently has the importance of her poetry been acknowledged and the work of exploring its radical experimentation with
new modes of signification begun. Such explorations, emphasizing the poetry's lesbian themes and polysemous language, have
considered it necessarily antipatriarchal and thus different from the writings of her male contemporaries. Stein herself would
have disagreed with this view, of course; she looked upon her own work as at the center of experimental writing in her own
time. And it was.
Her first appearance in a periodical should have alone established her historical importance because it came in the special issue
of Camera Work (1912) put out by Alfred Stieglitz as an immediate response to the critical rejection of Cubism that followed its
introduction to the American scene in the 1911 issue of his journal. Stieglitz printed Stein's two portraits of Matisse and Picasso
along with representative paintings and sculptures by these artists and argued in an editorial that Stein's "articles themselves, and
not either the subjects with which they deal or the illustrations that accompany them, are the true raison d'être of this special
issue." Before the famous Armory Show of 1913, then, Stein had been established as a major innovator, and Camera Work
continued to publish her as it persisted in presenting Cubism to the American public. Again, in a special issue of 1913, Camera
Work featured Stein's
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"Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curona" as well as Picasso's portrait of Stein, connecting these visual and verbal
experimentations with nonrepresentational art.
As Stein's work began to appear in the little magazines published before World War I, she became the subject of interpretive
debate. Her importance in American literary circles can be measured by the essay, "How to Read Gertrude Stein," by Carl Van
Vechten, printed in Trend (1914). This essay argues for her nonreferential art, claiming that everyone tries to make sense out of
Stein just as everyone wants to make photographs of Picabia's drawings. But, Van Vechten claims, the essential aim of their art
is their attempt to get away from such sense. Thus, very early in the Modernist revolution Stein's art was celebrated for its
difference, its liberation from the "sense" of a reading that would dominate its playfulness, and, although Van Vechten did not
specify it, for what we would now identify as its feminist element.
This feminist aspect of her work, its release from a dominating "sense," again unidentified as such, was what William Carlos
Williams also wanted to praise when he pointed to its subversive tendency. Asked to contribute a manifesto and essay to the
newly established Pagany in 1929, Williams named his work first, "Manifesto: in the form of a criticism of the works of
Gertrude Stein." Later published in two pieces as "Manifesto" and "The Work of Gertrude Stein," in its first draft this essay
claimed that Stein was the most modern of the Modernists. If he omitted this accolade from the essay that was finally published,
he retained his praise of Stein, claiming that, like her friends the painters, she recognized that the purpose of art is form itself,
the resolution of its own strategies in organizing materials. Williams hailed Stein's work along with Dado and surrealism as art
that saves the mind from doctrinaire formulas and encourages the free play of language.
This early recognition of Stein's importance rested largely on her prose, which formed the bulk of her published work: Three
Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), Geography and Plays (1922), The Making of Americans (1925). Although she was writing
poetry during this period (and Tender Buttons is itself a prose poem), most of her poetry was not published until after her death,
in Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (19131927) (1953), Painted Lace and Other Pieces (19141937) (1955), and Stanzas in
Meditation and Other Poems (19291933) (1956).
However, this distinction of genre is not entirely accurate, and even
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here Stein is more experimental than this commentary has allowed. Her work is not easily separated into genres; she worked to
overthrow the conventions of genre, to mix prose and poetry, and to question the idea of a continuous work. What is printed in
the form of prose, Tender Buttons, for example, may have none of the narrative, grammatical, or syntactical continuity that
typifies prose. Furthermore, the continuity of a long prose piece can be interrupted by an abrupt change in style, as in the case of
Tender Buttons, where the third and final section, "Rooms," was composed almost certainly in 1911, before the first two
sections completed in 1913, and represents an earlier style of writing. Even this minor shift of chronology is important because
Stein moved rapidly through changes of style, and an arbitrary rearrangement of her writing in a single volume would confuse a
sense of her development. She was relentless in her experimentations, claiming that once she found it could be done, she lost
interest in it.
Stein's revolutionary fervor bypassed genre and chronology to concentrate on words alone, and her work has been divided
effectively, not into books or genres but into verbal and syntactic styles. After Three Lives Stein began to work in what she has
called the "insistent" style of repetitive and incantatory words, exemplified in her portrait of Picasso mentioned above as the first
of her experimental works to be published. That portrait concludes:
This one was one having always something being coming out of him, something having completely a real meaning. This
one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. This one was one who was working and he
was one needing this thing needing to be working so as to be one having some way of being one having some way of
working.
The "insistent" style of gerunds here is an effort to capture the rhythm of the personality or, as she claimed in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, exactitude in the description of an inner and outer reality. This style is underpinned by the
metaphor of childbearing for the creative act. "Having . . . something . . . coming out of him," Picasso is identified with an
instinctual and generative power rather than a rational one. Again, in a notebook entry, she claims that her brother, Leo Stein,
did his work with his brains but that she and Picasso created from an inner propulsion that they did not control. She saw herself
and Picasso as important because both of them could release the power in themselves and others by listening, observing, and
describing.
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To do this she experimented tirelessly, never listening nor looking from the same position. She went through constant changes
in writing "portraits," moving from her early repetitive gerundive style to a style that played with nonreferentialityin which
words were used as things, not to point to something beyond themselves but to be equivalent to it. The change can be seen in the
"Portrait of Constance Fletcher," done around 1911, which starts with the gerunds of the insistent style and again with the
metaphor of gestation: "She was filling in all her living to be a full one, she was thinking and feeling in all her living in being a
full one." Then the portrait shifts to "If they move in the shoe there is everything to do." Of this style, Stein writes, "This has
not any meaning.'' Its culmination in Tender Buttons severs language from referentiality and marks Stein as a precursor of the
postmodern questioning of representation, the subject, sequential narration, and logical meaning.
In the period when Stein wrote Tender Buttons she was engaged in creating an imagery of the female body, focusing on details
of the female anatomy and beginning to consider her own work as a writing of the body in what has been called an uncanny
anticipation of the theoretical formulations of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva some fifty years later. In Tender Buttons, for
example, she uses frequent images of the color red, suggesting menstruation and defloration as well as stains, bleedings, and
secretions. Also, she makes the connection between menstrual or uterine images and her own writing in "A Petticoat," where she
lists, "A white light, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm," placing the "ink spot" of writing next to the rosy spot on her
petticoat.
From 1914 to 1919 Stein began to write plays, using speech fragments or "voices," and working with commonplace, even banal
phrases that are quite different from the "lively words" of her earlier nonreferential period. For example, "White Wines" begins,
"Cunning very cunning and cheap, at that rate a sale is a place to use type writing. Shall we go home." Later, in "Lifting Belly"
(19151917), Stein's interest in ordinary speech rhythms creates a simple conversation between two lovers. The conversation in
this style has a referential meaning that much of Stein's experimental writing seems designed to deny. Its interest is in its subject,
the erotic experience of two women lovers, the wit of its language (Stein was living in a town outside Belley when she wrote it,
for example), and the playfulness of its tone. But, like earlier
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experiments, "Lifting Belly" is also marked by verbal excess and the play in language, indications again of an interest in the
text's surface pleasure and what has come to be called jouissance.
In the 1920s Stein moved away from this experiment to concentrate on another aspect of the surface of the text, the melody of
words, as a way of investigating the possibilities of sound itself. She claimed that she liked to set a sentence for herself as a
tuning fork and metronome and write to that time and tune. In "Sonnets That Please," from Bee Time Vine, she used the melody
of the nursery rhyme: "I see the luck / And the luck sees me / I see the lucky one be lucky. / I see the love / And the loves sees
me." She could also echo the rhythm and tone of more serious poetry, as in Stanzas in Meditation, part 2, stanza 1: "Full well I
know that she is there / Much as she will she can be there / But which I know which I know when / Which is my way to be
there then." But Stanzas retains the playfulness that characterizes much of Stein's work, opening with "I caught a bird which
made a ball" and continuing through 164 stanzas to conclude in the penultimate stanza with "Thank you for hurrying through.''
From her experimentation with melody and her efforts to play with the music of poetry, Stein moved in the late twenties and
early thirties to reinvent for herself some of the structures of literary order she had abandoned earlier. In "A Description of the
Fifteenth of November: A Portrait of T. S. Eliot," she writes a parody of pompous literary language, mixing sense and nonsense:
"On the fifteenth of November we have been told that she will go either here or there and in company with some one who will
attempt to be of aid in any difficulty that may be pronounced as at all likely to occur." But even here, repetition, the recurring
motif of the fifteenth of November, holds together this collection of entirely arbitrary material.
She appeared to be interested in this period in continuity and cumulative significance, organizing her work around successions
of single words. "Patriarchal Poetry" (1927) keeps the title phrase as a refrain throughout the text in order to display the banality
of the poetic tradition that Stein wanted to overthrow. The long poem contains variations of rhythm and purpose. Repetitive
phrases constitute some lines, such as "Patriarchal poetry reasonably. / Patriarchal poetry administratedly. / Patriarchal poetry
with them too." At other points she uses straightforward statement"Patriarchal poetry makes no mistake makes no mis-
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take in estimating the value to be placed upon the best and most arranged of considerations of this." Here, clearly, she has
abandoned the play on words in order to convey quite directly her negative judgment and subversive intent.
In the late twenties and early thirties Stein wrote in a variety of styles, composing short works and the lengthy A Novel of Thank
You and two of her most experimental works, Four Saints in Three Acts and Lucy Church Amiably. But these works belong to
conventional genres of drama and prose narrative in which she worked in the thirties and forties. With the publication of The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933 Stein achieved the kind of popular reputation she had sought, and, in that decade, at
least, her work, became, if not less experimental, at least more willing to negotiate with the conventional. She returned later in
her career to experiments in prose that anticipated the nouveau roman.
The immediately recognized importance of Gertrude Stein's writing in the emerging stages of Modernist poetry was her
willingness to detach words from referential meaning and employ them as painters used paint or musicians used sound. Stieglitz
linked her work to the analytical Cubism of her friend Picasso. Williams compared the music of her work to that of Bach,
arguing for its abstract design. And Sherwood Anderson compared her to American women of the old sort, scorning factorymade foods in her "word kitchen." Like Stieglitz and Williams, Anderson too felt she would be understood better at some future
time when her audience would catch up to her experiments.
In her own lifetime, of course, she did become better known, but not for her experimental writing. Until recently, she remained
a writer's writer. In a late interview she reported being asked how she managed to get so much publicity. She answered that it
was because she had such a small audience. She advised artists to begin with a small audience that really believes in their work
because such an audience will make a big noise whereas a big audience does not make a noise at all. This perception of her
position is both true and untrue. She had a small and influential audience among her contemporaries; but the publicity she
attracted (and courted) came not from that audience so much as from her acquaintance with influential painters and writers and
her willingness to publicize it. Still, it is the small audience interested in experi-
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mental writing that can be credited with renewed exploration of her work.
What they value in Stein's work is her willingness to attempt an extreme revolution in the use of words. For example, if she
shared with Williams an interest in the abstract design of an arrangement of words, she was willing to detach those words from
referentiality more fully than he was. His "so much depends / upon / / a red wheel / barrow" is not so thoroughly cut off from
referentiality as her "One or Two. I've Finished": "There / Why / There / Why / There / Able / Idle."
This fearlessness in experimenting with words manifests itself also in her willingness to break with narrative continuity,
established genres, and the linear logic that supports them. As a result, she was free to explore new ways in which her
experience might be incorporated in a text. Moreover, her prolonged search for a way of expressing her own erotic experience
and her love relationships allowed for the widest range of experimental writing, from the early hermetic style that encoded her
subject in The Making of Americans to the more open repetitive expression of "Lifting Belly." In this endeavor she brought into
literary language a range of experience not much explored by other Modernists. Perhaps only Hart Crane among the male
Modernists wrote anything approaching this kind of poetry, although, as we shall see, at this time H.D. was developing her own
hermetic rendering of love poetry.
Stein's contribution to Modernist experimentation is deeply dependent upon everything that patriarchal categories devalue:
women's erotic experience, the material of language, the play of irrational process in narrative, the surface pleasure of the text.
Tender Buttons (19111913) is a discovery of an aspect of language and experience that, as one critic has argued, exposes the
sacrificial enterprise of male culture and envisions a means of subversion that anticipates an important strand in later
Modernism. Stein's formal experimentation started from her study with William James and her commitment to the
experimentation of pragmatism. And it derived also from her questioning of authority in her private life. In breaking free both
formally and thematically from the linear logic of patriarchal language, Stein was able to uncover the hidden erotic pleasure of
everyday life and the language that expresses it. Her emphasis on the signifier in its play of rhythm, repetition, sound
association, and intonation, marks her as a precursor of the feminist theorists writing in the late twentieth century.
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If Gertrude Stein's appearance in Camera Work in 1912 indicated her importance in the emerging Modernist movement, H.D.
was also catapulted to a place of prominence in the pre-World War I literary revolution by the poems signed "H.D. Imagiste" in
the January 1913 issue of Poetry, which were followed two months later by the essay and manifesto on Imagism written by Ezra
Pound and F. S. Flint. In literary history she was to be for years to come the embodiment of Imagism and the restrictive poetics
enunciated in Pound and Flint's manifesto:
1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that [does] not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
If the three poems by H.D. that Ezra Pound sent to Poetry were better representations of this Imagist program than those by
Pound and her husband, Richard Aldington, published at the same time in Poetry, it was because H.D. had already perfected the
style that Pound claims to have discovered. For her it was a way of restraining and encoding emotions that threatened to
overcome her. She gave Pound the credit for discovering her, reporting that she showed him her poems, and he advised her to
cut a line here, shorten a line there, and offered to send them to Harriet Monroe. But her first poems in Poetry suggest that she
was already an accomplished poet before Pound intervened to get her poems published. Developing along her own lines, she
must have realized even then that, as she commented years later, "Ezra would have destroyed me and the center they call 'Air
and Crystal' of my poetry."
Nonetheless, in the early years of the Modernist movement, she published regularly and actively engaged in the literary life of
London. Her poems appeared in Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), and she assisted in collecting and selecting poems for the
1915, 1916, 1917 volumes of Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology. For one year, 19161917, she substituted for her husband,
Richard Aldington, as literary editor of the Egoist, and was herself succeeded by T. S. Eliot. In 1915 she won the Guarantors'
Prize from Poetry for "The Wind Sleepers," "Storm," "Pool, "The Garden," and "Moonrise," and in 1917 she won the Vers
Libre Prize from the Little Review for ''Sea Poppies." Sea Garden, her first volume of poetry, was published in 1916. Additional
volumes of poetry appeared: Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), Col-
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lected Poems of H.D. (1925), and Red Roses for Bronze (1931). After, there was a long hiatus in her published works, and she
did not begin to publish poetry again until the first volume of Trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall, appeared in 1944.
It is a strange history and perhaps best explained by her beginnings in Imagism, which have been misleading in establishing her
poetic interests. Despite Pound's program, when H.D. came to write her own poetics, in a manuscript written in 1919 but not
published until 1982 as Notes on Thought and Vision, she moved beyond the restrictive tenets of Imagism to found her art on a
much more elaborate and personally responsive idea of vision. In this short text she describes an experience that occurred during
a healing visit to the Scilly Isles in 1919, three months after she miraculously survived the birth of her daughter during a bout of
influenza. Her poetics developed as intimately connected with both her experience of giving birth and the maternal affection and
love that she received at the time from her friend Bryher. Although she never published this text, it contains germs of ideas
about creativity that would inform her later work.
For H.D. creative vision was not "the direct treatment of the thing" but a view into the "overmind," which she described as ''a
cap of consciousness over my head . . . like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is
like a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone.' Although she admitted that those jellyfish states of consciousness are of two
kinds, "vision of the womb and vision of the brain," and that before the birth of her child such states seemed to come definitely
from the brain, she claimed that most dreams are visions of the womb. The womb or body is itself the most creative, as H.D.
concluded, "The oyster makes the pearl in fact. So the body, with all its emotions and fears and pain in time casts off the spirit, a
concentrated essence, not itself, but made, in a sense, created by itself."
Here, again, the metaphor of birth serves to explain this woman writer's conception of creativity. By contrast, commenting
perhaps on the published list of Imagist Don'ts, H.D. claimed, "The new schools of destructive art theorists are on the wrong
track." Her theory was constructive rather than destructive, and she indicated what the right track would be in terms of maternal
creativity: "Memory is the mother, begetter of all drama, idea, music, science or song." Through such memory, she had access
to the "overworld consciousness" that is revo-
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lutionary and life-giving, as she argued, "Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could
turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of
dead, murky thought" and bring the whole force of the power of beauty and overworld consciousness back into the world.
Notes on Thought and Vision owes an obvious debt to the body consciousness of D. H. Lawrence, whom H.D. knew, and to
another friend, Havelock Ellis, whose work on sexuality interested her; but its emphasis on the womb and on creativity as
begetting distinguishes her work from theirs. Its style, too, is unique. Unlike Pound and Eliot, who wrote their critical essays in
the continuous prose of logical argument and with the authority of reformers, H.D. created an experimental text that is organized
in the form of the montage, which she, like Stein, took from the cinema and modern art. Although she has an important and
prophetic message about the need for a creative and constructive vision for her own age, she writes a text that is composed of
random and fragmentary "notes" rather than of a continuous and coherent argument.
If in writing criticism H.D. was unwilling to govern the text from an authoritative point of view, in her poetry she was even
more open and receptive or more willing to be infiltrated and perhaps hidden entirely within another identity. In this state, she
could identify with the god of crossroads, in "Hermes of the Ways": "But more than the many-foamed ways / Of the sea, / I
know him / of the triple path-ways, / Hermes, / who awaits." "Dubious, / facing three ways,'' Hermes is a crossroads figure, split
and yet optimistically waiting. In this sense, he resembles, as does H.D., Stein's portrait writer, open to others, and the image of
the mother, receptive and waiting.
Responsive to others, she was also willing to reinterpret them and connect their stories with her own, rewriting the role of
women in myth by allowing Eurydice and Artemis, for example, to tell their stories of defiance. "Eurydice" begins in regret with
the statement, "So you have swept me back," but she goes on to discover the power of her own position and concludes, "At least
I have the flowers of myself, / and my thoughts, no god / can take that," Artemis, speaking in "Orion Dead," claims, "I am
poisoned with the rage of song."
Not just the woman rising against her own victimization but the woman silenced and thus offering a mute indictment of her
society was
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H.D.'s subject. She moved outside the process of male myth-making to comment on its silencing of women in "Helen." In this
early poem, taking as her subject Helen of Troy, the literary embodiment of female beauty and sexual passion, H.D. rewrote the
traditional story of Helen, to claim, 'All Greece hates / the still eyes in the white face" "could love indeed the maid, / only if she
were laid, / white ash amid funereal cypresses." For H.D. the male idealization of women was dangerous and life-denying. This
figure of Helen remained in H.D.'s imagination until she finally reworked her story completely in Helen in Egypt, written in
19521955. But even early in her career, she set herself deliberately against conventional beauty, claiming, of the "Sheltered
Garden," ''I have had enough. / I gasp for breath . . . for this beauty, / beauty without strength, / chokes out life." And the poem
concludes: "O to blot out this garden / to forget, to find a new beauty / In some terrible / wind-tortured place."
Beneath the Greek myths and history of her early poems, H.D. suppressed a personal struggle that was more openly revealed in
the largely unpublished autobiographical fiction of the twenties and thirties. However, three poems that she cut to publish as
expansions of fragments from Sappho in Heliodora (1924) are in their complete form personal revelations of her desertion by
her husband. "Amaranth" (published as "Fragment 41": ". . . thou flittest to Andromeda") concludes with a section omitted from
the Heliodora version in which the abandoned woman says to her lover, "How I hate you for this," and the goddess, speaking to
the betraying lover, warns, "Turn if you will from her path" "but you will find/ no peace in the end/ save in her presence."
"Eros" (published as "Fragment 40": Love . . . bitter-sweet") admits in both versions "to sing love / love must first shatter us."
Finally, in "Envy" ("Fragment 68": ". . . even in the house of Hades"), the deserted lover envies her beloved 'your chance of
death" in war. She confesses her frigidity, again in a passage omitted from the first published version. Her beloved was, she
writes, "more male than the sun-god, / more hot, more intense," while she was "unspeakably indifferent."
In contrast to these unhappy love poems is a group of poems in Hymen that link a restored sense of integrity with either chastity
or lesbian love. "White World," "Prayer," "Song," "Evadne," "The Islands," "At Baia," "Fragment 113." "The whole white world
is ours . . . delight / waits till our spirits tire / of forest, grove and bush." Here she identi-
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fied whiteness with creation divorced from procreation. In "Demeter" procreation or motherhood is a passionate if deeply
conflicted state. Demeter says, "I am greatest and least." Although Demeter can boast, "Strong are the hands of Love," when she
is confronted with the question, ''What of her/mistress of Death?," she can only reply, "Ah, strong were the arms that took / (ah,
evil the heart and graceless)." But she concludes by avowing her own superior maternal love, claiming that death's "kiss was less
passionate!"
The poems in Hymen (1921) and Heliodora (1924) indicate a mind in conflict, removed from the "overmind" of Notes on
Thought and Vision yet searching for that presence in her life. For example, "Fragment 113": "'Neither honey nor bee for me,'
"advises against passion that is "old desire," "old pain," "not honey, not the deep / plunge of soft belly / and the clinging of the
gold-edged / pollen-dusted feet." Rather, the poem argues for "heat, more passionate / Of bone and the white shell / and fiery
tempered steel." Again, in "Fragment 36": "I know not what to do: my mind is divided," another free working of Sappho, the
choice she must make is: "Is song's gift best? / is love's gift loveliest?" "I know not what to do" is the repeated refrain amid
"strain upon strain." At the borderline again, the speaker says, "so my mind hesitates / above the passion / quivering yet to
break, / so my mind hesitates / above my mind, / listening to songs delight."
Red Rose for Bronze (1931), the last volume of poetry published before Trilogy, some thirteen years later, does not reveal any
deepening of her resources. The lines thin out until they appear to be merely nervous repetitions of words: "stroke, / stroke, /
stroke" or "this / this / or this, / or this thing" in the title poem. Although a number of lines in poems start with "I say," in fact
the voice is muted, the speaking subject passive and suffering. Even the translations take on this mood. The defiance of the
earlier speakers, the violence of the imagery, the turmoil of the passionall are restrained in this volume. By 1931 the
experimentation in poetic expression of H.D.'s early work appeared to have run its course.
In the 1930s she wrote far less regularly than she had in the previous two decades and published very little. She wrote short
stories, some poems intended for a short volume that she projected as "A Dead Priestess Speaks," and she translated and
published Euripides' Ion with her own commentary (1937). But the accomplishments of her early
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poetry that established her as a presence in the emerging Modernist movement appeared to be over. She may, as it seems, have
lost her sense of direction, or she may have succumbed to the difficulties of suppressing or encoding her emotional alliances in
language that she felt was required even by the avant-garde audience to which she appealed. Clearly the difficulties of speaking
as a woman engaged her imagination deeply, but although she was in correspondence with other women writers she lacked the
community of interests that the male Modernists could generate among their friends. It was not until the violence of World War
II jolted her that she was able to find her voice and to create the woman-centered poetry that the experiences recorded in Notes
on Thought and Vision promised. Her reputation rests now on this work of her later period and, like Stein, on work that
remained largely unpublished in her own lifetime.
In the emergence of Modernism, as its history is conventionally written, H.D. has been an important figure because of her role in
the short-lived Imagist movement. Yet even within that movement H.D. was writing poems that may have been spare in
language, concrete in imagery, and sharply focused, but were also engaged in refracting complicated and conflicting emotions,
erotic experience, and creative anxiety. More important than her brief appearance as "H.D. Imagiste," was her effort to write
about a woman's erotic experience and to suggest, with whatever contradictions, the presence of a celebratory "overmind
consciousness." Like Gertrude Stein's, her work was distinguished by its exploration of female eroticism. Moreover, her revision
of myth, her engagement with the violence of war as well as with the misogyny of her generation, mark her as an astute social
and political critic and identify the range of her interests beyond Imagism.
The reasons why she should have stopped her experiments in poetry and have lost her sense of direction are probably not fully
recoverable. She suggested in notes made during her sessions with Freud in 1933 that unlike other poets she knew she was not
interested in a poem once it was written. "There is a feeling that it is only a part of myself there," she said, and went on to
explain that perhaps this is "partly due to the fact that I lost the early companions of my first writing-period in London, you
might say of my 'success,' small and rather specialized as it was."
One early companion that she did not lose was Marianne Moore, whose first volume of poetry she and Bryher brought out in
1921 with-
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out Moore's knowledge, collecting the poems she had published in little magazines and printing them in a twenty-four-page
booklet, Poems, at the Egoist Press. Although Moore had been reluctant to publish a book and expressed astonishment when this
book was sent to her, she found it "remarkably innocuous." She and H.D. provided encouragement and support for each other
from the beginning, reviewing each other's works, publishing or helping each other get published, and corresponding over a
lifetime. They had been students at Bryn Mawr together, although H.D. left without graduating and remembered Moore only as
the "mediaeval lady . . . in a green dress" at the Bryn Mawr May Fête. They established contact when Moore sent some poems
to the Egoist, then edited by H.D.'s husband, Richard Aldington.
Writing in the Egoist in 1916 H.D. called Moore the "perfect technician," who wrote with the assurance of her craft and with the
perfect artist's despair of ever finding an appreciative audience. H.D. argued, "She is fighting in her country a baffle against
squalor and commercialism. We are all fighting the same baffle." Their bond, H.D. acknowledged, is in ''our devotion to the
beautiful English language."
In turn, reviewing H.D.'s Hymen in Broom (1923), Moore was more pointed in her praise of the "magic and compressed energy
of the author's imagination." She admired her "faithfulness to fact." But most arresting is Moore's comment on the woman
writer:
Talk of weapons and the tendency to match one's intellectual and emotional vigor with the violence of nature, give a
martial, an apparently masculine tone to such writing as H.D.'s, the more so that women are regarded as belonging
necessarily to either of two classesthat of the intellectual freelance or that of the eternally sleeping beauty. . . . There is,
however, a connection between weapons and beauty. Cowardice and beauty are at swords' points and in H.D.'s work,
suggested by the absence of subterfuge, cowardice and the ambition to dominate by brute force, we have heroics which do
not confuse transcendence with domination and which in their indestructibleness, are the core of tranquillity and of
intellectual equilibrium
The pointedness of this comment, which might come as a surprise from a woman much praised by her male colleagues, indicates
the intensity of Moore's need for the encouragement as well as the example that H.D. provided her.
Moore's publishing career started in 1915 when a group of her poems appeared in the Egoist and in the April and May issues of
Poet-
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ry, two of the most important little magazines of the day. Of the first seven poems that appeared in these two magazines, only
the antiwar poem, "To Military Progress," survived among her collected work. Although some of her early poems were more
explicitly Biblical than her work was to remain (for example, such poems as "Appellate Jurisdiction," a commentary on St.
Paul's discussion of sin and redemption in his epistle to the Romans, or ''That Harp You Play So Well," a poem contrasting
David the psalmist with King David), she stated early the moral stance that she was to maintain throughout her career.
She moved quickly to different subjects, encouraged no doubt by a remarkable visit to New York City in 1915 where she
became acquainted with major figures in the avant-garde literary world. She met Alfred Kreymborg, who accepted some of her
work for Others and introduced her to Alfred Stieglitz's photographs. She then met Stieglitz, who showed her paintings by
Picasso, Picabia, Marsden Hartley, and gave her copies of Camera Work. In addition, she met Guido Bruno, editor of Bruno's
Weekly, among other short-lived avant-garde publications. He too published Moore's poems as well as an article by Richard
Aidington praising her work.
This busy one-week trip to New York City brought her to the attention of important writers and editors, and she was quick to
take advantage of the opportunities they offered both in publishing and in revising her work. In fact, her precocious
development suggests that she needed only encouragement and the right outlets to inspire the experimental writing that would
win her an important place among the early Modernists.
Between 1915, when she first started publishing, and 1924, when her second volume of poetry, Observations, appeared and later
won the Dial award, Marianne Moore's writing developed rapidly, and she established herself both as a poet and a critic. Like
Stein and like H.D., first presented as a Cubist and an Imagist, respectively, in the emerging years of the Modernist movement,
Moore gained a special kind of attention when Harriet Monroe published a "Symposium" on her first volume, Poems (1921), in
Poetry. A debate on the book's merits, written by Monroe with quotations from others, the "Symposium" argument centered on
whether Moore was a poet. H.D., Bryher, and the critic Yvor Winters argued that she was, and Winters claimed that, with the
exception of Wallace Stevens, she was the best poet in the country. On
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the other side, Marion Strobel, an associate editor of Poetry, complained that Moore, despite her intelligence, had not learned to
write simply. And Pearl Andelson, identified as "another poet-critic," asserted that her poems were "hybrids of a flagrantly prose
origin." Her male contemporaries among the poets expressed their praise of her work elsewhere: Pound, in the Little Review,
acclaimed her as a distinctly American poet; Eliot, reviewing Poems in the Dial, cited her quite new rhythm, her peculiar jargon,
and ''an almost primitive simplicity of phrase" as her great achievements; and Williams, in the Dial, called her poetry "a true
modern crystallization, the fine essence of today."
Although Moore was acclaimed from the beginning as an experimenter, the peculiar nature of her experimentation may not at
first appear to have any affinity with the experimental writing of Stein and H.D. Her interest in the elaborate structures of
syllabic verse seems quite different from the word portraits of Stein and the free verse of H.D. Nonetheless, her fireless revision
of the precisely fixed form of her poems marks an interest in the fluidity of form that is close to their interests. Firm though she
could be in her moral convictions, Moore remained nonetheless tentative when it came to form, both the forms on which she
gazed and those which she created. She never fixed firmly the body of her work, leaving The Complete Poems quite incomplete,
with omissions that may not be accidents but can often be casualties. Publishing various versions of poems throughout her
lifetime, she seemed never quite satisfied with the distinctive forms she had been at such pains to elaborate.
Like Stein and H.D., Marianne Moore had to work toward a form that would suit her purposes. The first stage of her writing,
from 1915 to the publication of Poems in 1921, was marked by experiments in stylized language. Using the already unusual
syllabic form that she had converted to her own purposes, varying the length of the lines and including internal rhymes, she
would experiment still further by converting published poems from syllabic to free verse or from free verse back to syllabic, as,
for example, "When I Buy Pictures," which started in a syllabic version but was first published in free verse, or "Poetry," which
went from syllabic to free to syllabic verse. Far from tinkering, Moore was experimenting with form, retaining an element of
open form even as she wrote in closed formal structures. Like Stein's unwillingness to be dominated by referential meaning and
H.D.'s receptivity
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to the voices of varied speakers, Moore's revisionary habits indicate an unwillingness to be fixed even in the intricate forms that
attracted her.
Unlike Walt Whitman, who was also a tireless reviser, Moore worked not with open forms but with very complicated and
elaborate structures. When she revised, she could not simply add to her form as Whitman so often did. Subtracting rather than
adding was her characteristic strategy, as if she felt she could move toward what she calls, in "To a Snail," "'the first grace of
style' . . . 'compression'" by successive, if shorter, versions of her poems. Although she settled early on a permanent and stylized
presentation of her own bodily image, encased in a black cape and tricorn hat, she could never fix firmly the body of her own
work.
Her revisionary strategies are an indication of her attitude toward the body as changeable and malleable, a surface to be adorned
and concealed by infinite variations of style, an attitude she transferred to the subjects of her poems. Late in her life when she
was asked about the source of her poetry; Moore quoted George Grosz's explanation of art, "Endless curiosity, observation,
research, and a great amount of joy in the thing." If the endless curiosity kept her at revision, the joy she mentioned connects
Moore with Stein and H.D. as celebratory seers. It allows her to be what she called an "imaginary possessor" both of the pictures
she looked at and of those she created. Like Stein and H.D. when she looked, Moore opened herself to the other, not to
appropriate it or triumph over it but to appreciate it, aware, as she wrote, in "The Labors of Hercules,'' that "one detects creative
power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment." Besides, she queried, in "Critics and Connoisseurs," "What is / there in
being able / to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of self-defense."
Moore's openness is distinguished from Stein's mixture of inside and outside as well as from H.D.'s visionary consciousness by
its relentless tentativeness and its conviction that "To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not
looked far enough," as she wrote in "England." Combined with this willingness to look far enough is a reluctance to be too
familiar, to imagine that the other is fully understood, to settle firmly on a final view.
Moore's interest in looking drew her to consider other skilled observers such as the "Old Tiger," which she addressed in an early
poem with sympathetic attachment: "you to whom a no / is never a no,
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loving to succeed where all others have failed, so / constituted that opposition is pastime and struggle is meat, you / / see more
than I see but even I / see too much." She discovered in the old tiger a model for the poet with an "eye which is characteristic /
of all accurate observers." Unlike the "cultured, the profusely lettered" (one might even say the literary establishment), the tiger,
"scorning to / push," knows "that it is not necessary to live in order to be / alive.''
This watchfulness and patience between the eye and its object (the habits of the poet no less than the predator) were exactly
what Moore found absent from T. S. Eliot, in work such as "Portrait of a Lady." In an early review of Prufrock and Other
Observations in Poetry (April 12, 1918), Moore attacked the "ungallantry, the youthful cruelty, of the substance of the
'Portrait.'" Clearly, she preferred the tiger's habits of observation to this particular poet's. It is the eye of the accurate observer
that she herself trained on objects and on her own poetry, discovering often that she herself had not quite accurately organized
her form. Attentive to the body of the work, her diligence is evident in a poem like "The Fish," which she revised to indicate
how the illusions of poetic form can coincide with the poem's play on optical illusions. The first version is organized in this
way:
The Fish
Wade through black jade.
Of the crow blue mussel-shells, one
Keeps adjusting the ash-heaps;
Opening and shutting itself like
An injured fan.
The revised version is organized more fluidly:
The Fish
wade
through black jade
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
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The change in the shape of the body of the text has made a difference to its reading. A poem that opens with the optical illusion
of fish wading through jade and "barnacles which encrust the side / of the wave" will be aware of the optical illusion or
interpretive difference between the two distinct lineations of the poem above. The eye sees and the ear hears the rhyme in the
second version, arresting the reading in a consideration of this paradox, preparing it for the final paradox of the sea: "All /
external / marks of abuse are present on this / defiant edifice."
External marks are what Moore studied in detail. The china swan with "swart blind look askance / and gondoliering legs" or the
"Camellia Sabina" with its "pale / stripe that looks as if on a mushroom the / sliver from a beet-root carved into a rose were
laid" or "The firs" [which] "stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top''these examples elaborate the
ways in which she was attentive to the suffice as an infinitely variable phenomenon.
Her sensitivity to detail might suggest an interest only in surfaces, but she had a clear sense of the limits of detail and an
awareness that not all external marks could be so clearly seen. In "An Octopus," for example, which moves through eight pages
toward the compliment that "Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus / with its capacity for fact," Moore was more
interested in capaciousness than in accuracy. Over and over, she insisted that there is no way to accurately measure the twentyeight ice fields she detailed. At the start, the "octopus" is described as "deceptively reserved and flat"; "Completing a circle"
around it, she claimed, "you have been deceived into thinking you have progressed."
The "octopus" is unapproachable, a place where all our observational skills are unreliable and even water is "immune to force of
gravity in the perspective of the peaks." Spotted ponies, "hard to discern," fungi "magnified in profile," inhabit a landscape that
is tricky, changeable, and impossible to accurately fix in view. She pictured the octopus-glacier" 'creeping slowly as with
meditated stealth, / its arms seeming to approach from all directions.'"
Here is no "'deliberate wide-eyed wistfulness'" in the description of nature but rather a constant iteration of the impossibility of
"relentless accuracy" in seeing and capturing anything in language, although she refused to resolve" 'complexities which still
will be complexities / as long as the world lasts.'" "An Octopus" is a view of the inscrutability of
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nature imagined by a woman and as a woman. The glacier is "of unimagined delicacy," "it hovers forward 'spider fashion / on its
arms' misleadingly like lace." It is "distinguished by a beauty / of which 'the visitor dare never fully speak at home,'" "odd
oracles of cool official sarcasm," which nonetheless differ from the wisdom of those '''emotionally sensitive'" whose hearts are
hard.
Hovering forward with arms approaching from all sides, this imagined glacier would appear to be the very image of the
engulfing mother, yet unlike Whitman's old crone out of the sea this feminized landscape is imagined not so much as personally
threatening but as stalwartly resistant. Its mysteries are those of "doing hard things," of endurance, of unimaginable resistance to
the poet's imaginative grasp. They are mysteries appreciated and confirmed here by this woman poet who imitated them.
"An Octopus" is certainly the most menacing maternal image among these three poets. Unlike Stein's "having something coming
out" of herself and H.D.'s vision of the womb the hovering many-armed octopus-glacier seems as ominous as it might be
delicate, beautiful, and durable. Yet Moore's maternal image is embodied in the "unegoistic action of the glaciers," where this
remarkably unegoistic poet could locate the interaction that forms the bond between nature and poet, reality and language, in
terms that serve also to describe the interaction between mother and child. The poet was not afraid of this natural landscape,
even when she was aware of its powerful and often inscrutable presence.
Observation, with its attendant skills of separation and attachment, forms the basis of Moore's experiments. It manifests itself
also in her efforts to discover how poetry differs from prose in an age when, as Moore wrote in "So far as the future is
concerned" (1915), "rhyme is outmoded." Later revised as "The Past is the Present," she quoted Habakkuk's "exact words,
'Hebrew poetry is prose / with a sort of heightened consciousness.' Ecstasy affords / The occasion and expediency determines
the form." Here, Moore was trying to identify with revolutionary poets like Pound and at the same time to indicate her distance
from them by allying herself with the moral and prophetic strain of Habakkuk that was quite distinct from the Greek and
Chinese sources of Pound's own early poetry.
This position, both inside and outside the developing Modernist movement, is best expressed in "Poetry" (1919), which opens
with the
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famous admission: "I, too, dislike it." As if agreeing with the detractors who saw Modernist poetry as simply difficult, Moore
went on to claim that "we / do not admire what / we cannot understand." She then catalogued subjects that the Modernists might
use for poetryalthough the genteel tradition would have relegated them to prosethe bat, the elephant, a wild horse, a tireless
wolf, the critic, even the baseball fan, statistician, and" 'business documents and / school-books.' "Moore's conclusion that ''all
these phenomena are important" aligned her with the Modernists, until the poem turns again against her contemporaries,
claiming that we shall not have poetry until poets can be "'literalists of the imagination.' "In the meantime, she claimed, if you
demand "the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness" and the "genuine," "you are interested in poetry." She could not
reconcile the opposition here between content and form, between the possibilities of poetry and its realization either in her own
work or in that of her contemporaries. This poem about poetry was never to quite satisfy her, and she spent a lifetime recasting
it, first cutting it to a shorter free-verse form, for Observations (1925), then returning it to its original form with minor variations
in the Selected Poems (1935), and then, in the Complete Poems (1967), cutting it to only part of the first three lines, relegating
the longer version to a footnote.
This ceaseless revision of her work led her to move away from the syllabic form she had developed early on to a kind of free
verse with embedded rhymes. She began in 1921 by converting into this freer verse form poems she had already written in
syllabic verse, such as "When I Buy Pictures," "Picking and Choosing," and "England," as well as "Poetry," and she continued to
write in free verse until 1925, just before she became editor of the Dial and stopped writing poetry until 1932. The incentive for
this experimentation in form may have been her closer connection with a community of poets and with the Dial, or it may have
been inspired by Pound's suggestions for revision of the syllabic version of "A Graveyard," which Moore redid in free verse and
published as "A Grave" in the Dial in 1921. Her experiments in free verse may also have come from her efforts, if not to
simplify her poetry, then to free it from exaggerated intricacies of form, realizing that "Truth is no Apollo / Belvedere, no formal
thing," as she wrote in the final stanza, breaking the syllabic form of "In the Days of Prismatic Color." Free verse allowed her to
accommodate prose more freely, and
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her poems began openly to include quoted passages identified by quotation marks. The magnificent poems of her free-verse
period, including "Marriage" and "An Octopus," are some of her most celebrated and difficult as well.
Moore's lifelong interest in observation made her a superb editor even if it meant that she stopped writing poetry when she took
up editing the Dial from 1925 to 1929. The magazine had a circulation of eighteen thousand and it published the best writers of
the day. Its editor was, then, in a position of considerable power, and Moore used that power to great effect. She published
Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge," Pound's Canto 22, William Butler Yeats's 'Among School Children," and poems by Williams,
Louis Zukofsky, and Stanley Kunitz, among others. She also wrote the monthly"Comments'' on subjects of her own choosing,
which were not unlike the subjects of her poetry. And she continued to contribute book reviews, agreeing to consider only those
writers for whom she felt some sympathy, such as Eliot (Sacred Wood), e. e. cummings, Stevens, Williams, Stein. In her
editorial work she played an important part in the development of Modernism. By the time she returned to writing poetry in
1932 both she and the Modernist movement were established. Her return in the next decade to the syllabic verse that she had
developed at the beginning of her career marked once again her independence.
Stein, H.D., and Moorethese three women Modernistswent to extremes in their early experimental poetry: Stein followed her
friends among the painters to the limits of nonreferentiality, where language could not proceed, and consequently never attracted
a wide audience; H.D., so overwhelmed by visionary experience and a private life of conflicted emotions that she exhausted her
creative impulse, fell silent in mid-career, and did not resume writing until the shock of the Second World War drove her to
produce her major long poems; and Marianne Moore made such a great effort to distinguish her characteristic style of
presentation from that of others that she seemed to be at times merely idiosyncratic even as she could not settle on a final form
for her work. Perhaps these extreme solutions and the poetic silences they occasioned are cause and effect; they may indicate an
insistence on independence that was ultimately too exhausting. But the length of their careers, the variety of their experiments,
the development of their own styles are indications that Stein, H.D., and Moore were among the most tena-
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cious and experimental writers of their day, working from a wholly different and more revolutionary attitude toward poetic
authority than the High Modernists.
Early on these women wrote out of a radical impulse in the first stages of the emerging Modernist movement. By the time that
Modernism had arrived at the point where it could be identified with one great founder, such as Pound, it had concentrated its
energies on the task of the long poem, which included history in an effort to conserve and memorialize rather than create and
disrupt. From the very beginning the women Modernists all expressed their resistance to this codification and to an identification
with their own generation of male poets. Stein claimed that "she did not understand why since the writing was so clear and
natural they mocked at and were enraged by her work," but, of course, she did everything she could to distance herself from
such figures as Pound, whom she called a village explainer, and Eliot, whom she parodied. H.D. set her poetics against the "new
schools of destructive art theorists," among whom she must have numbered her friend Pound. Moore, generally more agreeable,
nonetheless exercised her independence, not only in her reviews but in her energetic editing of poems such as Hart Crane's "The
Wine Menagerie,'' which she accepted for the Dial and radically changed.
In contrast to what they regarded as negative and destructive attitudes these women poets were anxious to establish a poetics
based on generativity, revision, and a curiosity that confirmed otherness. In their work the lyric "I" dissolves in an interactive
process that allows a participatory celebration even of such a thing as a glacier's obduracy, in Moore's "The Octopus," or a
"dubious" crossroads god, in H.D.'s "Hermes of the Ways," or the painter's "having always something being coming out" in
Stein's portrait of Picasso. Because they were considered marginal figures even by their friends among the male Modernists,
these women were free to experiment long after their male contemporaries were moved to consolidate and conserve their
positions. Moreover, the relentlessly experimental writing of these women poets was not limited by the misogyny, reactionary
politics, and conservative impulse that held back their male counterparts. They have waited almost a century for the readers that
they have today because they were at least that far ahead of their times.
Margaret Dickie
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Further Reading
Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1981.
DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1983.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Friedman, Susan Stanford, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. eds. Signets: Reading H.D. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1990.
H.D. H.D.: Collected Poems, 19121944. Ed. Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1983.
Hollenberg, Donna Krolik. H.D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991.
Holley, Margaret. The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Moore, Marianne. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York Macmillan, 1967.
Neuman, Shirley, and Ira B. Nadel, eds. Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature. Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1988.
Ruddick, Lisa. Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Slatin, John. The Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore. State Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.
Stapleton, Laurence. Marianne Moore: The Poet's Advance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Modern Library, 1962.
The Yale Gertrude Stein. Selections, with an introduction by Richard Kostelanetz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Steiner, Wendy. Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1978.
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Robert Frost and the Poetry of Survival
Robert Frost (18741963) was among the great poets of this centuryor any century. Only T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, in his
own lifetime, could be thought of as challenging voices. Nevertheless, as original as Frost was in his own extraordinary ways,
his work can be read as a culmination of the tradition of plain-spoken poetry in which the natural world is mined for metaphors
of spirit: a tradition mostly associated in English poetry with William Wordsworth, who at the beginning of the nineteenth
century defined a poet as simply "a man speaking to men."
Frost was a competitive man, as his biographer Lawrance Thompson has shown. Two of his main rivals at the start of his career
were Edwin Arlington Robinson (18691935) and Carl Sandburg (18781967). Robinson was a poet of considerable gifts whose
dramatic lyrics are still underestimated by critics. As Roy Harvey Pearce has written in The Continuity of American Poetry
(1961): "Robinson at his best transformed the characteristically egocentric nineteenth-century poem into a vehicle to express the
exhaustion and failure of its primary impulse." Robinson showed that to renew the old-fashioned Romantic lyric, poets would
have to come to terms with nature as it had been affected by the industrial revolution. They would have to deal with a
mechanized, impoverished, soiled, even burnt-out world. In a beautiful poem called "Walt Whitman," Robinson wrote, "The
master-songs are ended, and the man / That sang them is a name." No more the mere celebration of man, nature, and machine
that Whitman created in Leaves of Grass.
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Robinson pioneered an American version of the dramatic monologue that had been popular in England throughout the century.
He conjured a small New England town called Tilbury Town, which he peopled with such types as Richard Cory, Charles
Carville, Minniver Cheevy, Luke Havergal, Aunt Imogen, and Eben Flood. He characterized New England, in his poem "New
England," as a place "where the wind is always north-north-east / And children learn to walk on frozen toes." And his acerbic,
depressive New Englanders seem always on the brink of survival. Some, such as poor Richard Cory, "a gentleman from sole to
crown," do not survive: Richard Cory, "one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head."
Frost was asked to write an introduction to a book of Robinson's poetry shortly after the poet's death. In a letter to a friend at the
time of this request, he wrote of Robinson: "How utterly romantic the enervated old soak is. The way he thinks of poets in the
Browningese of "Ben Jonson"! The way he thinks of cucolding lovers and cucold husband in "Tristram"! Literary conventions! I
feel as if I had been somewhere on hot air like a fire-balloon. Not with him altogether. I haven't more than half read him since
"The Town Down the River." I simply couldn't lend a whole ear to all that Arthurian twaddle twiddled over after the
Victorians." For all this vitriol Frost nevertheless learned a good deal from Robinson, a debt he would never acknowledge.
Sandburg, too, had an influence on Frost. An almost exact contemporary, he "made it" before Frost, reciting his Whitmanlike
poems in celebration of America across the country: "Chicago," "The People, Yes," "Grass," and others. Like Vachel Lindsay,
whom he resembles in spirit, Sandburg sought a popular audience and developed a homey persona that played well in publicas
Frost would later do himself. Sandburg learned a great deal, as Frost had, from Amy Lowell, H.D., and Ezra Pound, the
Imagists, and his famous poem ''Fog" became a model of sorts for a "modern" poem, as he describes it rolling in
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Sandburg wrote that poetry is "a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations." This marries
well with
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Frost's famous definition of poetry as "a momentary stay against confusion." Sandburg is always blither, more simple-minded,
and "softer" than Frost. And in many ways Frost invented himself in contrast to a man like Sandburg, whose easy liberalism and
identification with "the common man" struck him as false. Frost is the loner, the individualist, and his poetry is a poetry of
survival.
Frost's accomplishments as a poet were hard won. A New Englander who spent some time in San Francisco as a child, he
struggled for recognition for two decades after dropping out of Dartmouth and Harvard and marrying his hometown sweetheart,
Elinor Miriam White. (Elinor and Robert had been tied for valedictory honors in their senior class at Lawrence High School, in
Massachusetts.) Frost stumbled from job to job, farming in Derry and Franconia, New Hampshire, teaching school, loafing. He
loved listening to his country neighbors, paying attention to what he called "their tones of speech." It was this tone that he would
capture and transform in some of his best poems.
In 1912 at the age of thirty-eight Frost quit his job of teaching at Pinkerton Academy, a rural prep school in New Hampshire,
and sailed to Britain with his wife and young children. He had pretty much in hand the poems of A Boy's Will, his first book,
which takes its title from a poem by Longfellow. In fact, by this time he already had completed much of his second book, North
of Boston. The Frosts settled in a little English village called Beaconsfield, and Frost set out to meet everyone who was
important in poetry circles in Britain, such as Ezra Pound. He also met a young poet called Edward Thomas, who would have a
profound influence on his work. Frost's rural subjects fit in nicely with the Georgian school of poets who were just gaining a
wide audience in Britain, and Frost found a publisher rather swiftly. David Nutt brought out A Boy's Will in 1913.
Frost, as always, understood exactly what he was doing. He was writing pastoral versepoems on rural subjects written for a welleducated "city" audiencemuch as Horace and Virgil had done in ancient Rome. In The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (1960) John
F. Lynen writes with savvy about what "pastoralism" means in Frost:
Frost, like the writers of old pastoral, draws upon our feeling that the rural world is representative of human life in
general. By working from this nodal idea he is able to develop in his poems a very broad range of reference without
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ever seeming to depart from particular mattters of fact. He says nothing of other places and other timeshe gives us only
the minute particulars of his own immediate experience; yet . . . the things described seem everywhere to point beyond the
rural world. The effect is to create a remarkable depth of reference.
Frost, then, is not a naive chronicler of farm life in rural New England. He is a poet fully aware of every influence, from the
ancient writers of Greek and Roman eclogues through the Romantics tight up to his immediate contemporaries. Furthermore, he
was a "Modernist" in his own way, which is why Ezra Poundthe ringmaster of literary Modernismfound him interesting.
Shortly after the publication of A Boy's Will in England, Frost wrote a memorable letter to his friend John T. Bartlett. In it he put
forth a theory of poetry that he called "the sound of sense." "I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn
out theory (principle I had better say) of versification. You see the great successes in recent poetry have been made on the
assumption that the music of words was a matter of harmonized vowels and consonants. Both Swinburne and Tennyson arrived
largely at effects in assonation. But they were on the wrong track or at any rate on a short track. They went the length of it." He
separated himself from these writers, who represented the reigning orthodoxy. "I alone of English writers have set myself to
make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."
The idea behind Frost's "sound of sense" theory is fascinating. "The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices
behind a door that cuts off the words," Frost explains. "It is the abstract vitality of our speech." In other words, the specific
denotation of the words, what we usually think of as "content," is less important than the way the language moves something
akin to the "mind's ear.''
Frost expanded in this same letter on how the "sound of sense" relates to poetic meter. "If one is to be a poet he must learn to
get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre."
The metrical line is fixed, unnatural: a set number of strong accents or "beats." Ordinary speech fits irregularity into the abstract
pattern of the meter. But the poetry in a line (another way of describing the "sound of sense") is the product of the difference
between the abstract metrical line and the natural flow of speech.
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The obsession with ordinary speech and its relation to poetry is partly what makes Robert Frost a modern poet. There is nothing
of the elevation of poetic style found in many Victorian poets in his work, nothing self-consciously "poetic." The poetry resides
in the plain sense of things, the articulation of moments of clarity and poise, the accumulation of what might be called "wisdom"
in the residuals of meaning that have accrued by the end of the poem.
Another aspect of Frost's theoryone he would hold for lifeis his understanding of symbolism and how it functions in a poem.
Frost liked to call himself a Synecdochist. "If I must be classified as a poet," he wrote in another letter, "I might be called a
Synecdochist, for I prefer the Synecdoche in poetrythat figure of speech in which we use a part for the whole." A symbol is
always synechochal, which is to say that an image is meant to represent something larger than itself. The metaphorical aspects of
the image are nonspecific, which gives them an aura of suggestiveness.
The poem "Mowing"from A Boy's Willis a good example of Frost's technique:
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
Frost liked to write about workingphysical laborand he found in physical labor a synecdochal image: the "mowing" of the poem
"stands in" for larger motions of the mind and spirit. That this is not just a poem about mowing hay should be obvious from the
first line. Why was there "never'' a sound beside the wood but one? Frost is separating this mowing from any purely physical
act; the mowing is a mental action
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that isolates the poet (a favorite theme in Frost's work overall). The poetand here "mowing" is analogous to writing poemsis
thoroughly absorbed in the work that is productive of meaning. As if to reinforce the connection, the scythe is said to be
"whispering." What does it whisper? Frost, in the Romantic tradition, does not place too much emphasis on the conscious
aspects of literary production. A poet's meanings are ''accidental." Thus, the mower says "I knew not well myself" what meaning
was produced by his motion.
In typical Frostian fashion the speaker goes on to muse about possibilities: perhaps it was this or that. One sees a gradual
unfolding of thought as image leads to image, as revelation produces revelation. As Lawrance Thompson notes in his early study
of Frost called Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost (1942):
The central theme is built around this blending of the earnest love which derives satisfaction from the activities of the
immediate moment. The extensions of the imagery suggest a much deeper emotional perception than that derived from a
mere statement of the essential meaning. Objects and sounds, the grass, the woods, the mower, sunlight, the snake, the
flowersall these combine to accentuate the intense pleasure within the mower himself.
Clearly, the physical act of mowing is only part of the story.
Frost adored paradox, and the surface simplicity of his poems is often undermined by currents of paradoxical meaning that
undercut the central, surface motion of the poem. In effect, the poems "deconstruct" themselves. In "Mowing" there is the
surface meaning that concerns the act of haying. The satisfaction of the work is contrasted with the "dream of the gift of idle
hours," the feeling of relief that the work is accomplished and the feeling that one might have gained something: gold, a job
done. The poet of the surface quickly interjects his belief that "anything but the truth would have seemed too weak," thus
celebrating the work itself as the goal. To extend the analogy to, say, poetry: the goal is the writing of the poem, not the
resulting reputation of the poem or poet. Indeed, with an aphoristic compression worthy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frost's great
precursor, Frost says: "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." Nevertheless, the last line subverts this. "My long
scythe whispered and left the hay to make."
The last line is pregnant with possibilities. "Left the hay to make" is a Symbolist's ideal moment: an image that ramifies in many
ways,
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that carries beyond its immediate denotation. To leave the hay "to make" is to let it ripen in the sun. The result of the workthe
nourishment of cattle, for instancecomes later: months later, perhaps, as the cows in the winter barn munch on the hay. But one
can hardly avoid other echoes; "Make hay while the sun shines" is only one (and plays into the sexual metaphor implicit in
"Mowing," where the analogy to making love is obvious enough). Perhaps the poet's work is an avoidance of seizing the
moment elsewhere? That a man's complete meaning is derived alone, at work, without women, is a consistent theme in Frost and
one that could be explored at length in all of his work. But, most telling, the last line of "Mowing'' suggests that meaning is not
at hand, that the goodness of the work is an afterecho, something that follows indeterminately. This undermines the poem's
central theme, which is that the "fact" is the best thing. (Although, even here, one should stop to wonder why a fact is the
sweetest dream that labor knows.)
There is almost no poem by Frost that does not yield to long and careful reconsideration. His work resists easy interpretation;
indeed, it often seems that Frost designed the poems to fool the innocent reader into taking the "easy gold" of a quick
interpretation. Almost invariably, these quick readings are wrong. Frost is plainly the most deceptive poet in the history of our
literature. He himself once said in a letter that "any poem is most valuable for its ulterior meaning."
The quest for "ulteriority" is all part of the Frostian world. On the surface one finds the sentimentalized view of New England
embodied in familiar images: dry stone walls, woodlots, lonely farmhouses, woods full of snow, fields of flowers, good-hearted
country people. But only a very superficial reading stops there. An early poem like "Storm Fear" is typical of the Frostian view
of man against nature:
When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lower chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
'Come out! Come out?'
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
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Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away,
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether 'tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.
Frost's personae in his poems are often afraid of the natural world. There is none of the mystical urge to unite with nature one
sometimes finds in Romantic poets. The nature of New England is inhospitable, something to be "got through." Frostand his
surrogates in his poemswant to stand apart from nature; the emphasis, always, is upon survival, the effort to "save ourselves
unaided."
Frost's second book of poems, North of Boston, which followed a year after A Boy's Will, is perhaps his most brilliantly
sustained collection. It contains half a dozen of his most famous poems: "Mending Wall," "The Death of a Hired Man," "Home
Burial," ''A Servant to Servants," "After Apple-Picking," and "The Wood-Pile." This last poem, one not often recognized as one
of Frost's very best, is a remarkable example of the Symbolist work of his early period. It is about a man who is "out walking in
a frozen swamp one grey day"a typical situation in a Frost poem. The poet-as-loner is a frequent image, one that derives from
the Romantic tradition (one thinks especially of Wordsworth here, who in a poem such as "Resolution and Independence" walks
out in the countryside in search of instruction of a spiritual kind). The speaker in Frost's poem stumbles upon a cord of wood in
the middle of a symbolic Nowhere: "a cord of maple, cut and split / And piledand measured, four by four by eight." What was it
doing out there, beyond the reach of human activity? There was no house in sight for it to warm, no other signs of humanity. It
was just left there to "warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay."
Again, one searches Frost for "ulteriority," for the synecdochal meaning of the poem. What does the woodpile "stand for" in
addition to its most literal, and important, level of meaning? It would be misguided not to recognize that, most crucially, this is a
poem about a woodpile. One can almost hear Frost smirking at the critic who would
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too quickly leap to grab at metaphorical rings of interpretation. Nevertheless, the woodpile is clearly an object of human labor,
the product of careful craftsmanship and sustained attention. It is, of course, very like a poem: something constructed for the
sheer love of doing it, left by itself to "warm the frozen swamp as best it could." The natural world, left to its own devices, is
pointless in Frost's deeply humanistic view of reality; indeed, one may well take William Blake's line as a gloss on all of Frost's
poetry: "Without man, nature is barren."
In North of Boston Frost also began to experiment with the dramatic poemthe monologue or dialogue poem. An old couple,
Mary and Warren, discuss the fact that "Silas is back" in "The Death of the Hired Man." Silas, an old hired man who has left
Warren's employment, has come home to die. Frost catches the regional cant of these voices with eerie perfection:
"Where did you say he'd been?
"He didn't say. I dragged him to the house,
And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.
I tried to make him talk about his travels.
Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off."
"What did he say? Did he say anything?"
"But little."
"Anything? Mary, confess
He said he'd come to ditch the meadow for me."
"Warren!"
"But did he? I just want to know."
"Of course he did. What would you have him say?
Surely you wouldn't grudge the poor old man
Some humble way to save his self-respect.
He added, if you really care to know,
He meant to clear the upper pasture, too."
On and on Mary and Warren struggle to come to terms with the fact that "Silas is back." The final turn, of course, is that Silas is
dead and the wrangling is all for nought. Frost had an astonishing gift for dramaindeed, he is one of our best dramatic poets.
And "The Death of the Hired Man" remains among his most memorable efforts, as does
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"Home Burial," a poem about a young couple trying to come to terms with the death of a child.
Anyone who imagines that Frost romanticizes country people and farm life has not read his poems carefully. The world
conjured in these poems is not idyllic. Death, exhaustion, illness, marital bitterness, cold, and moral bankruptcy are close at
hand. Frost's poems are built upon darkness, and the world he sees is one where sublimity, as in Wordsworth, is fostered by both
beauty and terror in equal proportions.
A poem in Mountain Interval (1916), Frost's third volume, called "'Out, Out'" is among his strongest, darkest, and most
exemplary poems about country people. Its opening is memorable in every way:
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it,
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
Frost's easy command of the blank verse line is breathtaking. The poem opens with an idyllic version of rustic country life, but
it soon takes a turn into some of the darkest regions of this poet's emotional territory. The boy who is the subject of the poem is
cutting wood with the buzz saw when his sister calls him in to supper. He turns quickly, and the saw cuts off his hand. The
economy of the way Frost expresses himself here adds to the dislocation one feels:
At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting.
In that "However it was" one locates a dark whimsicality that is part of the Frostian tone.
The narrative continues with succinct power. A doctor is called, and soon the doctor "put him in the dark of ether." But there is
really nothing that can be done for the poor boy:
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And thenthe watcher at his pulse took fright.
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No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Littlelessnothing!and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
The seeming callousness of those last lines are part of the Frostian effect. A casual reading might well give the reader the
impression that Frost is portraying these people as pragmatic to a point of inhumanity. But the total meaning of the poem,
framed by the title's quotation from Macbeth, goes beyond mere callousness. Frost invokes the tradition of tragedy, where "life
is but a walking candle." It is as if these rude country folk understand the larger point and in some way transcend their humble
circumstances in what William Pritchard calls the "weird, unforgettable bluntness" of the poem. They are deeply enthralled to
the labor-value of the boy. His hand is gone, so there was "No more to build on there." The buzz saw, snarling and rattling, is a
product of the mechanical revolution that has in effect mined the lives of these people. It implies a world beyond the farm, an
economic system that has diminished the world as a whole.
Mountain Interval also contains "The Oven Bird," one of Frost's unforgettable sonnets. Like "Mowing," it is a poem implicitly
about the act of writing, about a bird who "knows in singing not to sing," which is to say that he must abandon the worn-out
poetical diction and rhetorical conventions of his predecessors and offer a new kind of song. "The question that he frames in all
but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.'' The last two lines resonate with implications. What poet now writing is not
faced with this dilemma? The world as we find it, much as the world Frost found, is sadly diminished, and the poet's job in the
twentieth century has been what to make of this world, how to respond to its indignities, its savage and vengeful self-absorption,
its greed, its abandonment of common decency and justice.
Perhaps the most haunting poem in Mountain Interval is "An Old Man's Winter Night," a poem about an old man dying in the
wintry climate of New England and alone: "All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him / Through the thin frost, almost in separate
stars." The poem meditates implicitly on the human condition as a whole, though it remains neatly, even maniacally, focused on
the single old man here who "stood with barrels round himat a loss." The old man is somehow made to bear the weight of all
human loneliness, even though "a light he was to
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no one but himself / Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, / A quiet light, and then not even that." The man's inner
light, as it were, goes out as he sleeps; there is nothing left but the glimmer in the woodstove and the pale moonlight. The poem
ends with a handful of deeply haunting lines:
One aged manone mancan't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter's night.
The word "keep" is central here, as elsewhere in Frost, carrying a freight of ambiguous meanings. The word's original
denotation, in the Anglo-Saxon, is "to hold, to seize." By implication, a person's duty in life is to bear witness (as in the title of a
late volume by Frost, A Witness Tree), to maintain a vigil. Frost's poet is a hermit who nonetheless lets his light shine, keeps the
faith, holds steady against the chaos of the universe.
Critics such as Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell have stressed the darkness in Frost, his sense of the spiritual blight, and they
were right to do so. But there is a side of Frost that might be called "twilight." It emerges in poems like "After Apple-Picking,"
"Hyla Brook," "The Sound of Trees,'' and in so many of the later poems. Frost is always the poet of survival, and survival for
him entails the act of cognition itself. "After Apple-Picking" is, according to Reuben Brower and other critics, one of Frost's
finest moments. It is a deeply strange poem, to be sure. It begins:
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Again, one must look beyond the surface of a Frost poem to make any real sense of it. First, the poem is not about the work of
apple-picking but about the feelings that follow from it. "I am drowsing off," the speaker says in the monologue. And the poem
begins to conjure a peculiar dream state, a twilight in which the poem moves between the real world and the dream world,
between life and art. "I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired," says Frost. Here is the exhaustion of composition,
with its unbearable desire for something that can never be
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accomplished, since poetry is always a search for something beyond reach, a quest for a simulacrum of heaven, a place where
the absolute is attainable and where all contrarieties are reconciled. Frost, still a young poet, displays an almost overwhelming
burden of possibilities: "There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall." The last
line quoted is heart-breakingly beautiful, the syntax imitating and embodying the action it mimics, with the asymmetry of the
last phrase ("and not let fall") made wonderfully strange by its lack of parallelism.
Mountain Interval also contains the famous "Birches." In a fine book called Robert Frost and New England, John Kemp
identifies this poem as the place where a different kind of Frost poem has its origins. These are the poemsand there are more
and more of them as Frost's career unfoldswhere the poet speaks as farmer-sage, as a homespun philosopher. The poem as a
form of wisdom literature has an honorable tradition, of course, and Frost at his best does this kind of thing very well. "Good
fences make good neighbors" is a line spoken by a farmer in "Mending Wall'' that typifies his approach to poetry. In "Birches"
there is no farmer speaking but Frost himself as farmer when he presents a totalizing statement in the last line of the poem, "One
could do worse than be a swinger of birches." The calculated understatement here in some ways undercuts the poem, which is
mostly a splendid monologue. Indeed, there are incomparable passages in "Birches," as in this image of the girls in the following
lines:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
The symbolic motion of the poem, too, is controlled with consummate artistry. The poem is about boys climbing birches (the
sexual implications of this, as in "Mowing" and "Putting in the Seed," are wonderful to contemplate) to subdue them, to ride
them to the ground. Indeed, the poem moves toward a remarkable statement: "Earth's the right place for love: / I don't know
where it's likely to go better." These lines, according to James M. Cox in a strong essay called "Robert Frost and the End of the
New England Line," are "Frost's greatest lineslines which reveal the grace and loss and gain of all Frost's life and language."
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I think one may take Frost at face value in many of his wise utterances, as in the above instance. But Frost is dangerously
canny, andas suchhe often means less than he says or, occasionally, the opposite of what he says. A crucial example is found in
"The Road Not Taken," which ends with the often-quoted lines:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
A less than rigorous look at the poem may lead one to believe that Frost's "moral" is embodied in those lines; the poem is taken
as a call to independence, preaching originality and Emersonian self-reliance. But the poem deconstructs its conclusion stanza
by stanza. The poem's first three stanzas follow:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads onto way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
The poem, in fact, stresses that there is no difference, or little difference, between the two roads offeredit is all in the mind. The
second stanza claims that "the other" is "just as fair." The same stanza concludes that this same path is worn "really about the
same" as the first road, presumably the more well-traveled road. Indeed, by the third stanza the point is confirmed: ''And both
that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black." What more evidence does a reader need? So what is the "one
less traveled by" that makes "all the difference" to the speaker? The clue to the meaning of this poem lies in the
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two lines that open the final stanza: "I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence."
The poet will be telling his grandchildren, say, that he "took the road less traveled by" and that it "made all the difference." But
he will be lying. The poem is, perhaps, about the tendency in this poet and, by extension, the tendency in all of us to romanticize
our past, to lay claim to the "road less traveled," to glorify "the road not taken." But, indeed, the road not taken is not taken yet.
The title itself embraces the dazzling and tantalizing ambiguity of this poem, which is infinitely more complex than first meets
the eye. One should read this poem as a warning. Frost is saying: Don't take me literally.
Frost's fourth book, New Hampshire (1923), contains a number of Frost's best-known lyrics: "Fire and Ice," "Dust of Snow,"
"The Aim Was Song," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," ''Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "For Once, Then, Something," and
"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things." Frost's penchant for the brief lyric with an aphoristic bite is sharpened to a
point of fire in many of these poems, which marry beautifully with W. H. Auden's chief requirement for poetrythat it be
"memorable language." One never forgets a poem like "Dust of Snow":
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I rued.
Here, Frost ties in with so many other Modernist writers in savoring the moment of sudden illumination, what Joyce called an
"epiphany." But in Frostian fashion there is something underplayed as well; a mere change of mood is all that is celebrated, a
shift in feelings. The poem also, by implication, presents a rather gloomy image of the poet as solitary depressive as he wanders
in the wintry landscape rueing the day.
New Hampshire much more than Mountain Interval marks a beginning of the persona of Frost as philosopher of the common
man, a persona that would eventually smother the poet. The long title poem "New Hampshire" is not, for instance, one of Frost's
finer moments. Frost
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claims here to have "written several books against the world in general." He mentions having recently visited New York, where
he gets involved in "converse with a New York alec / About the new school of the pseudo-phallic." Here is the onset of a
frustrating Frostian stance: Frost as Reactionary. There is no doubt that Frost identified with political conservatism; what he
takes aim at in his poems is anti-New. He hates anything that smacks of Freudianism. He hates Marxism. He is the New
England equivalent of a Southern Agrarian, preferring small farming communities to large industrial dities. He hates the modern
world, with its machines, its pace, its lack of values, its tendencies toward collective behavior. He is always the Emersonian or
Thoreauvian Romantic, the individualist, falling back upon a stance of self-reliance. One mostly applauds these views, except
when Frost gets cute, as he does increasingly in poems from "New Hampshire" on.
Frost would from now on alternate masks. He could still write in his powerful "realistic" mode, and many of his very best
poems in this style lay ahead of him, including "Spring Pools," "Acquainted with the Night," "Design," "Provide, Provide,'' "The
Silken Tent," "The Subverted Flower," "The Most of It," "Directive," "The Gift Outright," and "Choose Something Like a Star."
But, increasingly, the books contained chatty, even verbose, presentations such as "The Lesson for the Day" and "Build Soil."
The latter, for instance, rambles on in this vein:
Is socialism needed, do you think?
We have it now. For socialism is
An element in any government.
There's no such thing as socialism pure
Except as an abstraction of the mind.
There's only democratic socialism,
Monarchic socialismoligarchic,
The last being what they seem to have in Russia.
This is Frost giving vent to hot professorial wind.
In 1920 Frost quit a teaching job at Amherst College to begin, as he wrote to his friend Wilbur Cross, "hurling fistfulls [of
poems] right and left." He claimed to have "kicked himself free from care and intellectuality." He had recently won a Pulitzer
Prizethe first of four he would receive in his liftetimeand was ready to dig in. The oddity is, of course, that Frost's digging in did
not result necessarily in better poems.
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There was something self-satisfied in Frost that, in his lesser poems, hurt him. One sees this attitude reflected in a telling letter
to a poet-friend, Kimball Flaccus:
You wish the world better than it is, more poetical. You are that kind of poet. I would rate as the other kind. I wouldn't
give a cent to see the world, the United States or even New York made better. I want them left just as they are for me to
make poetical on paper. I don't ask anything done to them that I won't do to them myself. I'm a mere selfish artist most of
the time. I have no quarrel with the material. The grief will be if I can't transmute it into poems. I don't want the world
made safer for poetry or easier. To hell with it. That is its own lookout. Let it stew in its own materialism. No, not to Hell
with it. Let it hold its position while I do it in art. My whole anxiety is for myself as a performer. Am I any good? That's
what I'd like to know and all I need to know.
This attitude hurt Frost terribly in the long run. But there were marvelous reprieves from this selfishness, and Frost would time
and again find himself engaged with the world in the generous way that is essential for the production of great poetry.
West-Running Brook appeared in 1928. It opens with "Spring Pools," one of Frost's most powerful and enigmatic lyrics.
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots and bring dark foliage on.
As with so many of Frost's poems, the natural world is a source of metaphor, and metaphorical thinking is for Frost the most
refined level of thought. As Margaret Edwards notes in an essay called "Pan's Song Revised" that was included in the first
volume of Frost: Centennial Essays (1974), this poem regards nature as a cycle wherein the "purpose of destructionin this case
the absorption of the poolsis creation." Edwards continues, "The water will 'bring dark foliage on.' The pools make summer
possible. And yet there is that note of regret for what the inevitable process will 'blot out and drink up and sweep away.'"
West-Running Brook also contains "Tree at My Window," a poem that meditates on the traditional Romantic conflict between
subject
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and object, posed here as an opposition between "inner weather" and "outer weather." The poet, in classical fashion, addresses
the tree:
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
He goes on to contemplate this "thing next most diffuse to cloud" and says that not all the rattling of the leaves-as-tongues
"could be profound." But he identifies with the tree, reaching for a reconciliation of subject and object through imaginative
sympathy:
But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
The poem moves toward an ingenious resolution in the final stanza:
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner weather.
Thus, the human mind is mirrored by the natural world, and the natural world is, conversely, mirrored; the concern with
"weather"which one might identify with "mood" or "spirit"connects the two worlds, draws them into the same cognitive sphere.
The demarcation of "inner" and "outer" worlds is discussed in lively terms by Frank Lentricchia in "Robert Frost and Modern
Literary Theory" (in the Centennial Essays volume):
Something in Frost wants to distinguish landscapes, to mark off "inner" from "outer," subject from object, human from
nonhuman; perhaps it is because Frost feels so strongly that the outer landscape is not congenial to the self: the sash, at
night, must be lowered, we must stay enclosed for our own good. All of which is to say that this poem, like so many
poems by Frost, is grounded in a tough realist's view of things. Yet Frost gives us no unnavigable gulf between subject
and object. The sash must be lowered, of course, but the curtain must never be drawn across the window. Thus, between
self and not-self Frost places a transparency which allows for an interaction of sorts, as enclosed self and weathered tree
take creative looks at one another.
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The tree is like a person, in that it dreams and drifts in sleep; the speaker, treelike, is "taken and swept / And all but lost." So we
get a complex sense of the relations between interior and exterior landscapes, with consciousness as "weather" serving as a kind
of mediating space. (Lentricchia notes that John Dewey, like William James before him, believed that selfhood exists only as
something potential until it is, in Dewey's words, "both formed and brought to consciousness through interaction with an
environment.")
A Further Range appeared in 1936. As the tide suggests, Frost was attempting to look beyond what he had done already in
poetry. Unfortunately, the collection is weighted down with poems that, in retrospect, seem chatty and slight. Frost was by now
on the college reading circuit in a busy way, moving from college town to college town and reciting his poems to large and
appreciative audiences. He was rapidly becoming the quintessential American bard, and audiences looked to him for "delight" as
much as "wisdom." Poems such as "Departmental" and "A Record Stride'' are burdened with a fatal cuteness. The latter, for
instance, ends with a sophomoric few lines:
And I ask all to try to forgive me
For being as over-elated
As if I had measured the country
And got the United States stated.
It is hard to forgive Frost for this kind of poetry.
Nevertheless, A Further Range contains "Design," arguably one of the best sonnets ever written by an American poet. It is a
frightening poem, one that confronts the dire possibility that the universe is not only godless but that God is evil. In keeping
with the Imagist tendencies in modern poetry, Frost centers the poem on a picture:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, homing up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth
Assorted characters of death and blight
....................
....................
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
The white spideralready a freak of naturehas landed on a white flower with a white moth in its grip. None of these three
elements is
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normally white, which gives each of them an abstract eeriness. The fact that these elements are "mixed ready to begin the
morning right, / Like the ingredients of a witches' broth" is deeply ironic: indeed, the language parodies the language of
breakfast cereal ads. What we get here is an image that combines death and blight. There is nothing life-enhancing about
anything in this piece of nature.
In the sestet of the sonnet, where issues raised in the octet are traditionally resolved, Frost simply offers three haunting and
unanswerable questions:
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.
The poem is in many ways the key to Frost's universe, a poem so perfect in its execution that one cannot imagine a word placed
otherwise. Frost's tone is deftly controlled throughout, with the poet's serious point balanced nicely by the parodic language of
the first stanza. Ever aware of the linguistic roots of words, Frost is inwardly winking when he uses the word "rigid" to modify
"satin cloth." Likewise, at the end, he is certainly aware (as a former Latin teacher) that the word "appall" means ''to make
white" in its root sense. And Frost is delighting in the way he can wring an unexpected turn of meaning from the Classical
argument from design.
That Frost was intimately familiar with English and American poetry is never in doubt: his work is flail of quiet echoes of his
predecessors. In "Design," for instance, one hears, a mock-echo of William Cullen Bryant's classic "To a Waterfowl," in which
Bryant meditates on the argument from design and writes of God as "He who, from zone to zone / Guides through the boundless
sky thy certain flight." One also sees in this poem a careful working out of some ideas raised by William James, the pragmatist,
as Richard Poirier argues in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977).
A Witness Tree appeared during the Second World War, in 1942, when Frost was sixty-eight. It is the last of his books where
the strong lyric gift of the earlier books remains present in any substantial way. The book opens with "The Silken Tent," a
seamlessly perfect sonnet
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composed of one sentence. The subject and verb of the sentence are completed after the first two words are uttered: "She is."
The poem is a conceit, with the "she" compared to a silken tent in many different ways. The poem unfolds with a sureness and
directness that takes away one's breath, especially as the sonnet moves into its concluding motion, in which we learn that "she''
is bound by the cords that hold the tent in place but "loosely bound / By countless silken ties of love and thought / To
everything on earth the compass round." And it is "only by one's going slightly taut / In the capriciousness of summer air" that
any sense of bondage is made apparent.
The high standard of "The Silken Tent" is maintained in a dozen more of the lyrics in A Witness Tree. One of the lesser known
of these is "Come In," a poem that might be considered archetypally Frostian in that the protagonist wanders out by himself in
the woods or countryside, often at night, and encounters something along the way that gives him pause to meditate. There is
usually a piece of Yankee wisdom at the end. "Come In" fits this pattern nicely. The poet encounters a thrusha very Romantic
thing to do! The thrush is frequently identified, of course, with poetry. Yet the poet-wanderer of "Come In" doesn't want to
come in, or to be taken in by the poetry of the thrush:
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
A few pages later one encounters "The Most of It," which is equal to anything else in Frost. In this poem the poet-wanderer
"thought he kept the universe alone." Again, Frost uses the word "keep" in a special way; here, it has the haunting sense of
"being responsible for." His reason for thinking himself so responsible is the Blakean one. "Without man, nature is barren."
Frost's nature is indeed cold, and it often seems to lack the humanization that William Blake demanded. Frost's hero calls out
across the lake, hoping for "counter-love" and "original response." But what he gets instead is the sound of a great buck that
leaped out of the woods and swam across the water toward him:
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouting like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrushand that was all.
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The force of "The Most of It" resides in the ferocity of the vision of nature embodied in the crudely powerful buck. Here is raw
energy without human purpose.
"The Subverted Flower," which comes soon after, deconstructs "human" nature in the same brutal terms, this time embodied in
the sexual urge of an adolescent boy who is reduced by his drives to a dog who froths at the mouth and seems to "bark
outright." The poem is a little drama, with boy and girl confronting each other in a ritual dance of sorts out in a field. The
setting is lush:
She was standing to the waist
In goldenrod and brake,
Her shining hair displaced.
He is standing with a flower in his hand: the flower being a thinly disguised phallus. Indeed, "he flicked and flung the flower."
And he gets caught as the girl's mother approaches and is horrified by the crude sight that she is forced to witness.
The girl is frothing at the mouth, too, as the poem is brought to a compelling halt, with the three-beat meter pounding like a
bass drum as the melody of the lyric plays lightly over the drumming triple beat:
And oh, for one so young
The bitter words she spit
Like some tenacious bit
That will not leave the tongue.
She plucked her lips for it,
And still the horror clung.
Her mother wiped the foam
From her chin, picked up the comb
And drew her backward home.
With the noble exception of "The Gift Outright," an unusual and unusually panoramic Frost poem, A Witness Tree falls away in
the second half of the collection. While most poets would be delighted to have written poems such as "Time Out," "The Lost
Follower," or "The Rabbit Hunter''to mention a few of the more interesting poems that may be found herethe compact fury of
Frost's best work is missing.
Frost wrote two long dramatic poems in the mid-forties: A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947). The
former is a witty digression on the theme of Job, while the latter's focus is Jonah. In each
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case the orginal Biblical story is replayed in a contemporary setting. But there is little real drama in these masques, which are
digressive and pseudophilosophical in the manner of "West-Running Brook." Nevertheless, they are relatively unknown and
deserve a wider readership than they have thus far gotten.
In 1947 Steeple Bush was published. Reviewing this collection in the New York Times Book Review, Randall Jarrell said that
"most of the poems merely remind you, by their persistence in the mannerisms of what was genius, that they are the productions
of someone who once, and somewhere else, was a great poet." This is sadly true, although Jarrell wisely excepted a poem called
"Directive," which is Frost's attempt to write what M. H. Abrams once identified as ''the greater Romantic lyric." It is one of
Frost's finest moments, a poem of huge imaginative pressure that opens with some of this poet's most compelling lines:
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
And continues, building on these specific details:
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
"Directive" is both an elegy for a world lost in time and a program for the future. It is Frost's version of Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey," and like that poem it begins with a journey backward to place where one once had inspiration. Frost, at the tail end of
his poetic career, senses his own flagging powers. The focus is gone. The poet's language, once capable of being fired to a fever
pitch, has cooled. But here the poet blows on the coals, which now break upon themselves and burn brightly one last time. The
poet returns to a child's playhouse by a stream, where he finds a mock version of the Holy Grail. But here, in childhood, was the
source of inspiration. Here in the woods by the stream was the origin of all poetry:
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
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These lines provide a marvelous gloss upon Frost's entire corpus. His verse was always too "lofty and original to rage." The
poet finds here, briefly, that momentary stay against confusion that has always meant so much to him, these Wordsworthian
"spots of time" where time dissolves.
Except for the Keatsian "Choose Something Like A Star," there are few other places in Steeple Bush where one can easily rest
for long. And there is very little to commend In the Clearing, which appeared in March of 1962. But Frost was, after all, almost
ninety by the time this last book appeared.
Looking over the entire career of Robert Frost, one sees a breathtaking vista. Poem after poem breaks ground in places where
one might never have thought a house of stanzas (a "stanza" is, literally, a room or floor) could he erected, and Frost builds and
builds. His work is full of permanent settlements. His language and tone, his angles of vision, are a huge part of American
literature and consciousness. And he has prodded inspiration for contemporary poets as diverse as Richard Wilbur, Donald Hall,
Robert Pack, Peter Davison, and Seamus Heaney. One is tempted, with Frost, to conclude by repeating his own great lines
ending "Directive": "Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."
Jay Parini
Further Reading
Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost., Ed. Edwin Connery Latham. New York Henry Holt, 1969.
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York Oxford, 1977.
Pritchard, William H. Robert Frost: A Literary Lift Reconsidered. New York Oxford, 1984.
Thompson, Lawrance, and R. H. Winnick Robert Frost, A Biography. New York Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1981.
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Ezra Pound's Imagist Aesthetics:Lustra to Mauberley
The letters page of the American Book Review from November-December 1987 staged a nasty but epitomizing confrontation
over Ezra Pound: Sister Bernetta Quinn, an apologist, defended the Cantos from the "irresponsible attack" of Paul Oppenheimer,
who had ripped Pound in the previous issue; Oppenheimer, in his turn, savaged Quinn and the Cantos' "pervasive bigotry,"
"vapid ideas of economics and history," and "frequently poor writing." The opposition of aesthetic and moral realities says all
there is to say about how much of Ezra Pound's reputation is still in dispute. Nearly fifty years after the Bollingen Committee
awarded its prize to the Pisan Cantos people cannot make up their minds whether Pound is the man Eliot named "the better
craftsman'' or the man Wyndham Lewis once called "a man of impeccable taste and no vision." Pound's reputation goes on
swinging between extremes of admiration and contempt, attracting biographers and others, amazed by how much of such a
controversial life, through historical innocence or insensitivity, can be peeled away from its poetry.
Whether through merit or controversy, Pound has stayed in print. The collected shorter poems, Personae (1926), went through
several editions and at least seven impressions before arriving in Baechler and Litz's truly satisfactory, recent, and much revised
Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1990), which contains not only an index and an accurate table of
contents but detailed appendixes as well. Despite a respectable complement of published dissertations like
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George Kearns's Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Cantos (Rutgers University Press, 1980) and scholarly escorts like Edwards'
and Vasse's alphabetical Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound: Cantos ILXXXIV (University of California Press, 1971),
the editorial condition of the 815 pages of my 1986 reprint suggests, to someone if not of good will then at least paying
attention, that what the Cantos need principally (and after ten printings) is a good copyeditor. Pound's letters contain some of the
greatest prose written in the century and the best introduction to his work. They are often difficult but endlessly entertaining,
give a capsule history of twentieth-century art, and ought to be required in all creative writing programs.
By some estimations the criticism may outlast the poetry. It was first collected by T. S. Eliot in the early riffles when Eliot
edited and introduced Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, drawing from four earlier booksPavannes and Divisions (1918),
Instigations (1920), Make It New (1934), and Polite Essays (1937)and noting the existence of much fugitive material, some
"rescued from the fries of periodicals" by the faithful James Laughlin, owner and publisher of New Directions. Eliot was limited
by space and wholly excluded excerpts from two other major prose works: Guide to Kulchur (1938)which has been more or less
continuously in print and reappeared in 1970 with a brief preface by Pound, then two years away from deathand the earnestly
undergraduate but still readable The Spirit of Romance (New Directions, 1968). A book Eliot neither mentioned nor excerpted,
Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New Directions, 1979), is central to Imagism or Pound's art criticism. William Cookson undertook
to supplement Eliot's selection and to "show the unity of Ezra Pound's vision" with Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 19091965 (New
Directions, 1973), which contains writing on politics, religion and money along with some jejune aesthetic reflection that Eliot
ignored, such as "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" (191112). After the music and art criticism, both of which have found their way
into collections, Pound's Translations (New Directions, 1953), Confucius (New Directions, 1951), and The Confucian Odes
(New Directions, 1959) are probably indispensable to any knowledge of the man Eliot called "the inventor of Chinese poetry for
our time.'' Finally, Pound the biographical project has, over the decades, attracted several biographies whose interest stops with
their subtitles. We've seen Pound the "difficult individual," the "last rower," and most abysmally, "the solitary volcano," but
none can claim the exhausting objectivity of
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Humphrey Carpenter's A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), which ranks easily with Charles
Olson's moving record of conversations with Pound at St. Elizabeth's, Earl Stocks not unbearable Life of Ezra Pound (Avon,
1970), and Hugh Kenner's critical masterwork, The Pound Era (University of California Press, 1972).
Pound is too enormous to surround in no matter how encyclopaedic an essay, so I limit myself to early and middle Pound, from
Lustra through Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. I concede the objective validity of the moral issues: Pound's political excesses have
blocked access to his poetry (and criticism) for so long and for so many that it is not unfair to wonder whether the former has
not permanently ended passion for the latter. Two major assumptions, moreover, precede me. The first is the core insight of The
Pound Era: "Pound's work, say from Lustra to the last Cantos, is the longest working-out in any art of premises like those of
Cubism." I would put an even finer point on this: Pound, early or late, was an Imagist. The two-line "In a Station of the Metro,"
which appeared first in Poetry in 1912 and in a slightly different form in Lustra, is the formula that embodies the premises
behind longer and more complex worksthe works of Pound's own maturity, Mauberley and The Cantos, and work influenced by
Pound, from Eliot's The Waste Land and Zukofsky's A to Olsen's Maximus poems, Ginsberg's The Fall of America, and
Ammons's A Tape for the Turn of the Year. A second assumption: Imagism, no matter how congenial attempts to discredit it,
was the first serious attempt to rethink poetry's discursive directions since Wordsworth. What happened to Imagism after Amy
Lowell transformed it into "Amygism" is of historical interest only, but its theoretical implications, especially on poetry as a
spoken medium, are not. As Pound himself said, "The great writers need no debunking," and Pound remains one of the great
American writers of the English language. To take seriously him and his brainchild, Imagism, is to unpack the visionary
background of twentieth-century art and understand why it is so hard, why it seemed so new, and why so many of its
practitioners were so pessimistic about its future.
The distance Pound covered between Ripostes (1912) and Lustra (1915) is a measure of what he set out to escapeRomanticism
principally and Symbolism secondlyand the poetic methodology that he would invent and call Imagism. After an education in
broad cultural
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realitiesmodern technology, Cubism, oriental poetrythe "doctrine of the Image" reemerges as the ideogrammic method of the
thirties. But Imagism itself is preceded by a cocooning, as it were, from which, if his prose alone is any indication, Pound
brought two senses of himself. The first, that he was charged with a pedagogical mission, is, depending on your view of Pound's
poetry, either its glory or calamity. The second, that a "scientific" understanding of the art of poetry is indispensable to its
production or consumption, issues in an instrumentalist approach to everything, especially art. While the instrumentalist theme
never disappears from Pound's poetry or criticism, it is, and especially early in the century, the demonic twin of American poetic
theories, from Eliot's early criticism to Williams's description of a poem as a "machine made out of words." Both senses, one of
the poet's role and the other of his philosophy, appear in "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" (191112). ''The artist seeks out the
luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment. His work remains the permanent basis of psychology and metaphysics."
Throughout the essay he distances himself from "Scholarship," meaning institutional learning, by retreating to similar revisionary
formulationscapitalizing Luminous Detail in the second paragraph, for instance. His debt to Shelley's Defense, to Coleridge, to
French Symbolism is undeniable. He is a Shelleyan legislator ("As for myself, I have tried to clear up a certain messy place in
the history of literature"he was barely twenty-six when he wrote this), a Socratic dialectician charged with cleaning up public
taste by requiring poets and readerships to know things, and at times a doctor ("If a book reveal to us something of which we
were unconscious, it feeds us with its energy; if it reveal to us nothing . . . it draws energy from us"). In a section called "On
Technique" he seems to find his range: "Let us imagine that words are like great hollow cones of steel of different dullness and
acuteness. . . . Let us imagine them charged with a force like electricity, or, rather, radiating a force from their apexessome
radiating, some sucking in." The thing runs on for another one hundred or so words and makes us wish he would explain his
explanation, especially since he ultimately places the passage under erasure ("This peculiar energy which fills the cones is the
power of tradition, and the control of it is the 'Technique of content,' which nothing short of genius understands"). Only his
enthusiasm forgives the silliness of the analogy. By comparison, the one Eliot fetched out eight years later
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to explain how poetry is like science"I invite you to consider . . . the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated
platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide"is almost tame. Not silly, however, is how much
Pound needed a metaphor of precisely this instrumentalist character to mediate the recidivistic post-Symbolist-late-Romantic
rhetoric quickening his own.
Symbolism worried Pound. Verlaine and Baudelaire he lumped together, claiming that neither "is the least use, pedagogically, I
mean. They beget imitation and one can learn nothing from them." The Symbolist "dealt with 'association,'" ''degraded the
symbol to the status of a word," conferred on his symbols "a fixed value." Yeats, whose presence drew Pound to England in
1906 and whom Pound, late in 1913, served as amanuensis and collaborator, was also suspect. A "transparent lamp around a
spiritual flame," Yeats called the symbol, itself the manifest content of what emanates from Anima Mundi. "O Rose, red rose,
proud rose of all my days" is a pointer to no real rose at all but to an abstraction that stands for Ireland, Intellectual Beauty,
whatever Yeats wishes. As late as the Pisan Cantos (1948), Pound identified visionary Symbolism with spiritual evil:
Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel
and Uncle William dawdling around Notre Dame
in search of whatever
paused to admire the symbol
with Notre Dame standing inside it
(Canto 83)
The French sentence is an allusion to Baudelaire's Les Paradis Artificiels, a memoir of hash-and-opium addiction indebted to
DeQuincy: the clear line-of-sight is from Baudelaire, who represents by implication the late-Romantic and Symbolist traditions,
to Yeats, who represents even later variants of both. A paradis artificiel is a rhetorical necessity imposed on the world by those
who cannot live in it and derives from a goût de l'infini, a taste for infinity (as Baudelaire titles the first chapter). The world of
Verlaine's Claire de Lune, say, or of Yeats's "Byzantium" are just such artificial paradises, toy or substitute worlds. A symbol,
Pound believed, is potentially evil because it fixes an existential value in a word and replaces a physical with an intellectual (or
mystical) value; the Symbolist then proceedsand the analogy with charging money at interest,
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or usury, certainly would not have escaped Poundto circulate the substitution term as poetic currency. "The imagiste's images,"
on the other hand, "have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra," Pound said. The resilience of the image
was its ability to resist capture by whatever rhetoric a greedy politician or an incompetent poet might dream up to exploit it.
There is no getting around this last point: Pound was obsessed with the exploitation of language. His faith in the poet as public
servant, a major persona in Lustra, stands behind his denunciation in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (191516) of "the periodic
sentence and the flowing paragraph" as behind the fall of Renaissance Italy. "For when words cease to cling close to things,
kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish. Rome went because it was no longer the fashion to hit the nail on the head. They
desired orators." The image was itself an instrument of vision, a lens, as well as an expression of that organic property of human
consciousness to which Coleridge gave the name Imagination. Like a scientist, the Imagist learned from history and used it;
unlike the scientist, he dealt in emotions. "I see," said the unidentified Russian to Pound, "you wish to give people new eyes, not
to make them see some new particular thing.'' The vision of this new artist-as-scientist gained focus through the image, which
resisted reduction to the monadic simplicity of the symbol, whether a placard word, a political slogan, or a poetic term.
One needs to keep Pound's moral fervor in mind in reading Lustra for another reason: his obsession with historical memory,
memory as written record. He seems at times to regard human history as a faintly imbecilic curator constantly misplacing or
destroying the productions of human genius, and only kept in line by poets. One of the "lessons of history," he says in the 1929
"How To Read," again playing Shelley's Unacknowledged Legislator, is that "maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the
health of the very matter of thought itself" is the poet's job.
The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his
laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati. When
their work goes rotten . . . order goes to pot.
Durability, he adds, depends on utility, and utility measures your closeness to tradition. Thus, while aligning yourself with
tradition guaranteed nothing, in the long run it was less dangerous than the Symbolists'
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"systematic derangements of the senses," which replace traditional means with a hermetic vocabulary of sensation, impressions,
and feeling "deprived of intellect, and out drunk on its 'lone, saying it is the 'that which is beyond the intelligence.'" Tradition
could at least tell you what needed to be done. Tradition, moreover, according to Pound's understanding of it, is essentially
historical memory embodied in books and cultural monuments that no personal apocalypse can touch. Pound before Lustra had
matured a recognition of how much Symbolist aesthetic had yielded legitimately to traditionor historical memory: he was never
blind to the formal beauty of works of genius, like those of Baudelaire, Rimbaud (whom he translated), and Yeats; Lustra gave
him the opportunity to find out how much of that formal yield tradition would permit him to carry over the threshold of Lustra
and into the practice of Imagism and the extroverted art of his maturity.
From the opening page it is clear that Lustra is a book with a mission. What it is Pound suggests in the definition of lustrum he
adds below the dedication: "an offering for the sins of the whole people, made by the censors at the expiration of their five years
of office." The poems are ritual sacrifices made by a public official about to leave office; Lustra is therefore a public service and
a uniquely public book. Satirically brooding over morality, society, and poetry's power to change things, the poems either laugh
at their audience or ask their audience to laugh at itself; they are usually framed as envoys directed to twit this or that vested
interest and to bring some reforming sense to British taste. The self-conscious "Tenzone" opens the book, and it is typical.
Pound's readership is likened to ''a timorous wench" fleeing from him, "a centaur / (or a centurion)," and preyed on by pimping
critics:
Will they be touched with the verisimilitudes?
Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.
I beg you, my friendly critics,
Do not set about to procure me an audience.
This mob of blameless virgin consciousnesses fleeing the "touch" of his songs or of Pound himself is the reading public toward
which Pound strikes a typical pose ("I mate with my free kind upon the crags"). The poems possess a kind of adolescent
masculinitya description not absurdly applied to the contents of a book whose author so often addresses its parts as if they were
male childrenand a masculinity not
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entirely uncomplicated by learned ironies. The distich "touched with the verisimilitudes" alludes obliquely to Horace (3:3), for
instance. Pound is also opening a personal referential domain in Lustra: in his correspondence he had a habit of comparing
intellectual to sexual penetration. The plenum of sexual power, or so Pound apparently believed, was a kind of IQ. As he wrote
in a postscript to his translation of Remy de Gourment's The Natural Philosophy of Love (1921), "The brain itself, is, in origin
and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve." Successful entrance into another
consciousness is, therefore, a kind of sexual victory, a measure of the strength of intellect over stupidity. This in a way explains
the genealogy of the crag-denizen of the endinga classical centaur, Tennyson's eagle and Nietzsche's Zarathustraall paradigms of
predatory, isolated, vigilant masculinity. Occasionally the irony is less esoteric: "The Condolence,'' which Pound writes to
console himself, anticipates the charge of voyeurism, so often leveled at Whitman:
We are compared to that sort of person
Who wanders about announcing his sex
As if he had just discovered it
Coopting the charge takes the bite out of it, but the attitude, retrograde or not ("the female is ductile"), never disappears from
his work ("The female is a chaos, the male / is a fixed point of stupidity," he says in a later canto).
In "The Garden," not incidentally one of the great lyrics of the twentieth century, the attitude actually matures. A young girl is
passing a railing in Kensington Gardens:
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.
Of several such poems where Pound describes an encounter this is the most finished and most suggestively tided. He presents
the objects of physical and poetic vision by a subtle "super-positioning," to use the word he uses to explain how Imagism works.
"The 'one-image poem' is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another," so he sets Kensington on
Paradise to prove the poet-physician's
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diagnosis ("emotional anaemia"). In the five-line "Shop Girl," which appears later in the book
For a moment she rested against me
Like a swallow half blown to the wall.
And they talk of Swinburne's women,
And the shepherdess meeting with Guido.
And the harlots of Baudelaire.
he reproduces this figurative vehiclefragile sensuality buffeted by windbut there is a subtle difference. The shop girl is a swallow
to whom an ephemeral sensuality clings; the young girl in Kensington is a "skein of loose silk," not even a creature but a thing
upon whom the world's impact is not tragic, but inevitable:
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
This backhanding of the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth") looks easy, but one
wonders what lesser competence might have done with the idea. A more hypotactic approach"who shall inherit the earth," say,
or "The meek shall inherit the earth"would have produced either studied preciosity or mere pretension. But Pound's triumph is in
raising the poem from the level where it is merely self-regarding, the spot where most of Imagism's officially anthologized
poetry languished, to permanent seriousness. A sentimental morality has produced a biological cul de sac of exquisite breed and
excessive delicacy, no Eve but an enigmatic mock-up; everything about her is fastidious and overdetermined by a religion
reduced to aphorisms. Moreover, this is no Eden, so why should what is sturdy and unkillable not inherit the earth?
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
The prosody, end-stopped for two lines before casually and ironically rolling to a stop, reacts to the "end" of breeding. London's
street rats collaborate in fulfilling the prophecy precisely because what they
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surround reproduces itself only if forced to. Breeding is an impasse to precisely the eugenic miracle it proposed. Given the
book's alignment of sexuality and intelligence, moreover, the contact that the alien Pound represents is more than sexual: he
offers to "touch with verisimilitude" the cultivated pococurantism of the well-bred whose choice is either dilutation or
annihilation.
Pound's on-again, off-again love affair with British societywhich, after all, produced his wifeis driven by an obsession with
civilization and "order" not unanticipated in a suburban boy who once attended a military academy. "The Garden" telescopes
that obsession successfully and gathers a series of similar savagings in its range. An exhausted moral system has also produced
"Les Millwin," their "mauve and greenish souls'' lying "like so many unused boas" in the balcony at the Russian ballet, their
eyesnote the adjective"aenemic"; "The Bellaires" ("The good Bellaires / Do not understand the conduct of this world's affairs");
the horse-faced lady, of "Simulacra," who recites Swinburne as Pound passes; the svelte woman who rests her unslippered feet
on a restaurant table napkin ("Black Slippers: Bellotti"); the predatory relations swarming the corpse in "The Social Order"; the
"little Aurelia" given in marriage to the "palsied contact" of Phidippus ("Society"); and the woman who casually sizes up Pound
in "The Encounter":
All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I arose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.
These brief satires are a continuing, coherent reflection on twentieth-century morality; their subjects are spiritually related, all
victims of the same "botched civilization" that Pound attacks in Mauberley, although in Mauberly the provocation is the
slaughter and "wastage as never before" of World War I. From Lustra on, Pound is telling essentially the same story, spinning
the same fable about the consequences of a morality that substitutes the symbol for the real thing, studied weakness and
incubated sexuality for classical strength, and most disastrously for the artist, mystical pleasures for physical ones.
It would be going too far to assert that in his frank love of sensuality Pound ignores the consequences. Mauberley's creator was
not, like his creation, "an hedonist." One day, in "The Tea Shop" the waitress "is not
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so beautiful as she was, / The August has worn against her. / She does not get up the stairs so eagerly." The poem trips over its
own logic:
Yes, she also will turn middle-aged,
And the glow of youth that she spread about us
as she brought us our muffins
Will be spread about us no longer.
She also will turn middle-aged.
The gently introjected future has some of the psychological sadness of Whitman's narrative of the twenty-nine bathers in Song of
Myself and some of the bitterness of Baudelaire's "Les Fenêtres." But Baudelaire is too often a people collector bent on
voyeuristic reductions of life to "legends" while Pound comes closer to Whitman's compassion. The iteration of line 5 gently
turns the poem from satire to elegy without getting stuck in sentimental ubi sunt reveries. The gift is, after all, the waitress who
''brought us our muffins." Yet which of us will not, like her, "turn middle-aged"? This mere sketch demonstrates a mature
balance of sensuous wisdom and moral realism that bears out the book's title.
Discussions of Ezra Pound and his influences can come down to checklists of his readingto material sourcesand attract those
with scholarly passions more archaeological than, say, biological. A convenantal understanding seems to be at work: Pound is
the sum of the cultural details identified in the footnotes to the poems, outside of which the man himself hardly existed. This
overstates the critical preoccupation of Poundians, but only a little. A line like Pound's "They shall inherit the earth" is a source,
that is, is writing reduced to the material level of print, where a line or a phrase points self-consciously "backward" to its
antecedent(s) and, in a sense, gives itself away. Critics like Harold Bloom have attacked both Eliot and Pound not so much for
pointing backward but for having done so with such demanding self-consciousness that "familiarity with the text" means being
familiar with the whole textual "family" it belongs to, and returning the prodigalMauberley, The Waste Landto that makebelieve network of extended literary relationships called tradition, which is merely another version of Freud's "family romance."
For source Bloom has influence, which points, not to the bare thinghood of the antecedent ("Blessed are the meek, for they shall
inherit the earth"), but to the dialectic of renewal or disaster that happens when two poets (Matthew 5:5; Pound, "The Garden")
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creatively, which is to say antagonistically, encounter each other. Kenner's position is the outgrowth of Eliot's powerful
cautionary fable, clearly among the most influential essays of the century, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), which
promotes impersonality, a respect for tradition, and radical indifference toeven disrespect for"originality." Eliot is himself
repeating Matthew Arnold's evangelizing for an unbroken canon of values, a tradition to which each generations work is
laboriously and unabashedly mortgaged.
Modernism is arguably the godchild of Arnold and daughter of Eliot, with Pound as midwife, so it is important to understand
how poetry comes to be made according to the early Eliot. The process is strikingly like the production of scholarshipa
continuous and cumulative hieratic undertaking, with "disinterested" critics acting as an oversight committee conducting traffic
flow. But an antithetical criticism views such a reverential stance as hogwash. Poets do not collaborate like initiates lining up for
the laying on of hands. The assumption that the production of poetry somehow involves cooperation with the very tradition that
is out to get the poet leads to a sentimental confusion of the manifest content of the given poem with its latent content, which is
what it refers to, and which is always prior, greater, "better." It is acceptable to superimpose the Garden of Paradise and the
Kensington Gardens only so long as the priority of the former is respected and the result is irony, which preserves the
distinctions between locations; it is not acceptable to assume that the poet wants to overcome the irony andas though suddenly
recognizing, like a child uncovering its eyes, his own originality, a quality of poetic genius that Eliot refused to countenanceredo
the Fall or send up the Sermon on the Mount.
On the face of it, Lustra is no place for antithetical critics. Much of the poetry gives itself up immediately, like "Amities," with
its epigraph from Yeats, its French allusion, and a six-line coda in Pound's own Latin that bittersweetly renounces some of
Pound's older, less vital professional friendships. The funny "Epitaphs" to Fu I and Li Po (who ''also died drunk. / He tried to
embrace a moon / In the yellow river"), "Our Contemporaries," a send-up of the recently deceased Rupert Brooke that got
Pound into minor trouble with Harriet Monroe, and "The Three Poets," a Catullan satire of poets, are glibly referential and show
no signs of struggle. Slightly more vicious is "Tempora," where "The Dryad" who stands in Pound's yard, "With plain-
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tive, querulous crying," calls not the name of Tammuz, the god she serves, but "May my poems be printed this week? / The god
Pan is afraid to ask you, / May my poems be printed this week?" The "Dryad," a coinage reserved for his letters to Dorothy
Shakespear, whom he was courting, enciphers H.D., endlessly tortured by a lifelong crush on Ezra and by her vulgar love of art,
or at least getting published. Like the young girl in "The Garden," she is ruined by a refinement uneducated in the sort of selfconscious irony that Pound in "Epilogues" directs against his own poems, which he dismisses as a ''seven days' wonder."
There is, more hopefully, "The Lake Isle," one of Pound's several attempts to exorcise Yeats, either through straight parody or
mocking tributes like "Au Jardin," from Ripostes, a satire of Yeats's "The Cap and Bells." In "The Lake Isle" Pound asks the
gods to send him, not to Innisfree, but to "a little tobacco-shop," with shiny scales, neat shelves, and "whores dropping in for a
word or two in passing, / For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit." Pound gets Yeats right down to phrasing, and the closing
is memorable:
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession,
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.
But here Pound is merely having fun with Yeats's horror at being related through his mother to the purse-proud Buffers. The
poem's turn toward Yeats is nowhere as complex as, say, the turn of Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" away from Keats's "Grecian
Urn." The other influences advertise themselves openly, in epigraphs (Lope de Vega), titles ("After Ch'u Yuan," whose opening
line is another Yeatsian echo, "I will get me to the wood"), internal quotations ("Lugete, Veneres! Lugete, Cupidinesque!"), and
outright translations (Catullus's "To Formianus' Young Lady Friend," Bertran de Born's "Dompna Pois De Me No'us Cal"). But
in most cases a good raking-out with Ruthven's Annotated Guide shows influences to be sources after all and suggests a
connection, though to a lesser extent than with Ripostes, with an autograph book. This is precisely the procedure that critics
usually adopt in reading Pound: winding their way, usually in Kenner's wake, through Pound's work to disclose the author of the
inscription, at times to reenact the
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poetry's cultural complexity while tacitly admitting to its psychological aridity. Psychological complexity can mean many
things, though always it is where or when one's sense of mortality is touched by the poet's sense of her ownthe heavenly hurt
that Dickinson says scars us with "internal difference / Where the meanings are." If this turns the point around to mean that
cultural complexity is psychological complexity in Ezra Pound, the judgment that concludes Kenner's The Pound Era ("Thought
is a labyrinth") is not unintentionally ironic but accidentally profound. In Lustra the poetry begins making a full about-face,
turning the often weakly rendered subjective energies of Ripostes outward, toward social satire and cultural criticism. There is
of course nothing inherently unpoetic about this volte face. Whether Ezra Pound wanted to be solved out of his work by
replacing him or his thought with the labyrinthine culture behind it is not the same as asking, without irony, whether Pound's
obsession with written historyor his obsession with memory as written recordso utterly displaces subjective interests from
Mauberley and the Cantos as to make those poems, at least for some, unreadable.
The negotiation of influence in Lustra is a crucial threshold beyond which Pound will tend, if I may put it in this blunted way,
more and more to substitute objective for subjective interests, historical for human complexitiesthe image and luminous detail
for the lived occasion, or as he says in Mauberley, the "Classics in paraphrase" for the lesser "mendacities" of an era of
uncontrolled introversion. It is with this understanding that readers must regard "A Pact"a nine-line poem of relative
inconsequence to critics except as an index of what not to look for in Poundi.e., a sense of the importance of Whitman. Donald
Davie, in Ezra Pound (Viking, 1975), dismisses both Whitman and Blake with a rousing post-Watergate reminder that American
democratic traditions were "framed on neoclassical models by assiduous Grecians like Jefferson and Adams," illogically
implying that any embrace of Whitman (or Blake) is a rejection of assiduous Grecians and European influence. Early in his
career Pound did see Whitman just that simplistically:
[Whitman] is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that
echoes with his time. He does "chant the crucial stage" and he is the "voice triumphant." He is disgusting. He is an
exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.
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Yet this essay of 1909, "What I Feel About Walt Whitman," withholds as much as it gives. Moses, as someone versed in the
Bible once reminded me, was guaranteed the nearest glimpse any man has ever had of the Creator and hid himself in a hollow
place in the rock to witness the passage of Yahweh: Whitman is the hollow wherein the voice that is great within us echoes and
Pound-Moses hides. What is on Pound's mind is the issue of poetic succession, a real worry by 1915 and "A Pact." Its famous
opening
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father.
carries over the note of specious exasperation from 1909. But the poem makes an interesting and unanticipated tonal shift:
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root
Let there be commerce between us.
The very clarity of the verse may obscure what is also going on. The breaking of the "new wood" must refer to the revolution
that is Whitman's prosody, a revolution, Pound says in a letter of 1931, that "the Concord school" missed, failing "to see the
forest for the trees." The man who insists on "breaking the pentameter" is therefore gesturing to the father of free verse, but the
gesture is initially antithetical: "pigheadedness'' stands for Whitman's lack of refinement, whereas Pound is "a Walt Whitman
who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt," as he says in that same essay. All of this explains the poet's detestation but
not why it has been surrendered. The answer can be found in the immediate textual logistics. Eleven poems precede "A Pact,"
among them "Tenzone," an apology for his own power, "The Garden," his demystification of the Fall, and the three poems titled
"Salutation," "Salutation The Second," and "Commission," each of which contains instructions to poems setting out like children
from their parent. "Commission," which comes before "A Pact," opens,
Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
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Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors,
and ends, "Go out and defy opinion, / Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood. / Be against all sorts of mortmain." This
is a prosody, a litany of directives, educated in Whitman's lists; this audience is also the audience Whitman targets. The paternal
pose that Pound himself strikes toward his poems leads to his alarmed recognition that his own detestation of the father is, in its
way, conventional. Hence that last line, with its redefinition of the father-son relationship as a business deal: Walt the Forebear
vanishes into Whitman the Forerunner. The prodigal returns only after he has dispatched his own children.
Whitman arrived early and stayed late. In the Pisan Cantos, Pound, having found Whitman "in a cheap edition" in a latrine,
aligns him with tradition through echoes of section 2 of Song of Myself
hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip
through an aeon of nothingness
when the raft broke and the waters went over me . . .
which he re-echoes in the Libretto to Canto 81:
Hast'ou fashioned so airy a mood
To draw up leaf from the root?
Hast'ou found a cloud so light
As seemed neither mist nor shade?
(Canto 81, 1058)
Whitman's humility before the natural world brought home to him the absurdity of those who "feed on the specters in books,"
and the irony was hardly lost on Pound, sixty-years old, broken in health and his books reduced to left-behinds, that it is
Whitman who rescues him "from the gates of death":
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd
the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
(Song of Myself, 2:2931)
Canto 82 completes the cycle of antithetical completion and recognizes
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in Whitman another poet-outcast, another Villon, En Bertrans, Dante, another Pound:
"Fvy! in Tdaenmarck efen dh' beasantz gnow him,"
meaning Whitman, exotic, still suspect
four miles from Camden
"O troubled reflection
"O Throat, O throbbing heart"
The broken English, which introduces a quotation from "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," belongs to Richard Reithmuller,
author of Walt Whitman and the Germans (1906) and instructor of German at the University of Pennsylvania. "Four miles from
Camden" would place you near Penn, in downtown Philadelphia, where Whitman is still "exotic, suspect,'' and still considered a
bizarre choice to name a bridge after. The surface of Pound's Cantos and all of his work after Lustra, so overwrought with
allusions raw and refined, is a not at all superficial expression of his insistence on a poetry of double accomplishments: a poetry
possessed of the integrity of good history and driven by the passion of memory that precedes great understanding. Rarely is that
surface more pitted than when it meets Whitman, who really does seem more than historical memory, scholarship, or intellectual
passion can comprehend. The work of preservation that Pound carried on occupied the surface of his art; this privileged
relationship to Whitman is an important and violent breaking of the surface.
Imagism is essentially an elliptical approach to poetic design, substituting juxtapositional for connected meanings. In Lustra
Pound invents Imagism, with the most fully foregrounded example of the habit realized in "In A Station of the Metro," as he
aligns the "apparition" of "faces in the crowd" with "petals on a wet, black bough." The point of any "poem of this sort," he says
in 1918, "to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and
subjective," implies a critical distance between subjective and objective interests; poets measure, define, and apportion these
distances by introducing, reducing, or maintaining them. To exercise the Imagist habit is to see two things outside the hierarchy
of normal perception:
With clouds over Taishan-Chocorua
when the blackberry ripens
and now the new moon faces Taishan
(Canto 83)
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Right through the Cantos one can find small and large examples of what Pound has matured from conscious strategy to a mental
habit of perceiving the world doubledJapan's Mt. Taishan superimposed on New Hampshire's Mt. Chocorua, for example.
Imagism was conceived as a philosophy of perception, an absolute way of looking at the world.
It was also a fairly characteristic modern rescue operation to free poetic subjectivity from both its enemies (science) and its
friends (French Symbolism, Romanticism). Eliot's assertion of an objective correlative (in the 1919 essay "Hamlet") in
emphasizing the existence of an objective, hard, here-and-now world to which poetic imagination is responsible attempts the
same thing. Here is Eliot:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external
facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
All this about "objects," a "formula," and "external facts" is revealingly mechanical; yet Eliot, like Pound, wants to square the
traditional subjective interests with a new objectivity. Pound's radical departure from Eliot is that the image simultaneously
foregrounds the subjective and objective directionsan arrow with two heads, what Kenner calls a vectorwhich occupy
imagination as phenomenological equals. There is a world of difference in their terminological directions, between what in Eliot
is ''evoked" and what in Pound "darts inward." Eliot seemed almost pathologically disinclined to approve the poet's subjectivity;
even in his most generous discussions Eliot made subjectivity the property of the poem, teased out ("evoked") not by readers so
much as by the poem's magnetic attraction to (or deflection from: it may fail to work) tradition. Hence the endlessly interesting
platinum wire analogy that he invites us to consider in 1919's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and his assertion that "the
more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." Poets are
catalysts; poetic compounds are emotions.
For all his instrumentalism, Pound was indifferent to or comfortable with the faint fideism of "the Imagist faith" (my italics) and
its 1913 list of "tenets":
I. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
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III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
Years ago, Frank Kermode (The Romantic Image, 1957) pointed out how Pound's noisiest scientific formulations of poetic
strategies or poetic power"As the abstract mathematician is to science so is the poet to the world's consciousness," from "The
Wisdom of Poetry" (1912) is typicalinevitably fall prey to their unacknowledged context of production. You could compile a
small book of extracts demonstrating how distracted Pound was by his need to conduct the imagination through the fields that
science had claimed and to get it past his own Romantic nostalgia for the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree. Whence the
Imagist protocols, which join ancient poetic wisdom to Ben Franklins approach to personal self-improvement. Imagism was that
détente, so typically American, between poetry and science, at once a "conscious aesthetic to fill the place of Rimbaud's
intuitions," in Kermode's words, and what Kenner memorably termed "specifications for technical hygiene." Both the philosophy
and the precept derive from the same excited source.
No matter how magical the properties of the "Image," its acquisition, proposed by Pound in typically instrumentalist, do-ityourself fashion, looks easy. This, of course, leads to a final, bittersweet irony. What prompts Pound's claim, in GaudierBrzeska, that "Imagisme is not symbolism" is a contempt for the Symbolists' "mushy technique," which in turn is motivated by
an even deeper disgust with what Pound terms, rightly, Symbolist "rhetoric":
Ibycus and Liu Ch'e presented the "Image." Dante is a great poet by reason of this faculty, and Milton is a wind-bag
because of his lack of it. The "image" is the furthest possible remove from rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of dressing up
some unimportant matter so as to fool the audience for the time being.
What Pound could not have foreseen, and what would issue from the hand of Amy Lowell in a year or so, was precisely an
Imagist rhetoric, where the "tenets" of Imagist theory became identified with the do'sand-dont's of Imagist practice, and where
Imagism, now "Amygism," began supporting a small canon of Imagist anthologies. By then Pound had already kissed off both
the movement and its sometime expressions. The change was swift. In August of 1914, less than eighteen months after the
formulation of an Imagist Doctrine, Pound uncomfortably
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curtsies to Amy Lowell's planned Imagiste anthology. "I should like the name 'Imagisme' to retain some sort of a meaning. It
stands, or I should like it to stand for hard light, clear edges." No "democratized committee" can be trusted with it. But in
October Lowell broke his heart with the ad for her book, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed:
Of the poets who to-day are doing the interesting and original work, there is no more striking and unique figure than Amy
Lowell. The foremost member of the "Imagists"a group of poets that includes William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ford
Madox Hueffershe has won wide recognition for her writing in new and free forms.
Pound's response is a two-sentence post-card: "Congratulations. Why not include Thomas Hardy?" Later that month, he breaks
with "official" Imagism and writes to Lowell,
I don't suppose any one will sue you for libel; it is too expensive. If your publishers "of good standing" tried to advertise
cement or soap in this manner they would certainly be sued. However we salute their venality. Blessed are they who have
enterprise, for theirs is the magazine public.
In that (out-of-print) scholarly curiosity, William Platt's The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature (Dutton, 1963),
Imagism lives on, represented by those who did not do the movement a disservice (Pound, H.D., Moore, T. E. Hulme, Eliot,
Lawrence, Stevens, cummings, Pound) and by those who did. Lowell's poems, when not simply horrible ("IfI could catch the
green lantern of the firefly / I could see to write you a letter," from "The Lover"), were simply, at times intensely, inane. For
example, in "Wind and Silver" she writes of the "greatly shining, / . . . Autumn moon" floating ''in the thin sky,"
And the fish-ponds shake their backs and
flash their dragon scales
As she passes over them.
Without regarding what the theory of the image implied apart from what official Imagism produced, the theory's crucial
implications and attendant problems are indistinguishable from a host of differently problematic, essentially unimportant poems.
Two extracts from Pound's prose introduce the problem. One is a letter to e. e. cummings of April 6, 1933, where the subject is
the appearance
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of a line of print on a page: "The normal or average eye sees a certain width without heaving from side to side. May be hygienic
for it to exercise its wobble, but I dunno that the offer [sic] shd. sacrifice himself on that altar." After noting how much of a
typical line he can see at once, Pound then adds,
But I don't see the rest of the line until I look specially at it. Multiply that 40 times per page for 400 pages. . . . Mebbe
there is wide-angle eyes. But chew gotter count on a cert. no. ov yr. readers being at least as dumb as I am. Even in Bitch
and Bugle I found it difficult to read the stuff consecutively.
The second extract is an aphorism from The A. B. C. of Reading:
Rhythm is a form cut into TIME, as a design is determined SPACE.
The letter reveals an unusual attention to the appearance of printed words in a magazine like Hound & Horn ("Bitch and
Bugle"), where one has to contend with the confinements of margins. Pound's decision to attend to the look, rather than to the
sound, of the line he quotes gains support from the metaphor of "wide-angle eyes": one instrument of vision (the human eye) is
defined by way of an analogy with another one (optical lens).
The aphorism relating time and space, moreover, expresses the same instrumentalist theme the letter voices, only with more
sophistication. Poetic rhythm is homologized with graphic design through an analogy that opposes time to space. Yet what is
slightly extraordinary about Pound's view is the conception of language that drives it: linguistic material caries a specific spatial
component; poetic materials, that is to say, are precisely materials. Words, like marble or metal, have extension and weight;
their physical placement or semiotic design is as accountable for their semantic value, what they come to mean, as what they
always, or already, mean in the mind of the author ("offer"). Meaning gets displaced across a "certain width" the eye ''wobbles"
over. Just to bedevil Pound the instrumentalist, I propose this counter-statement:
Allegories are things that Relate to Moral Virtues [.] Moral Virtues do not Exist[;] they are allegories & dissimulations [.]
But Time & Space are Real Beings [,] a Male & a Female [.] Time is a Man [,] Space is a Woman [,] & her Masculine
Portion is Death [.]
Blake would say that Pound, like Joshua Reynolds, is a mere materialist who errs in thinking of pictorial viewing space as the
accidental by-
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product of whatever occupies it, as some thing a painter governs and exploits through rationings of canvas or paper, either of
which piece of material is space. The Imagist, he would say, is a bookkeeper who generalizes about the relation of a thing in
one column of his ledger to something on the other through appeal to freestanding categorical headings ("Time": "Space").
Blake would find such ledgerdemain brutaleach item immobilized in its proper class, human agency buried in a syntactical
network of passive voicings (rhythm "is cut", design "is determined"). The connecting agency is either remote, impersonal,
marginalized, or displaced by the revisionary logic of the objective correlative and the doctrine of the image. The Blakean
advances time and space as "Real Beings'' (compare the logic of capitalization informing both poets' spellings of time and space)
that interact sexually. The instrumentalist displaces the emphasis from himself or intervening (creative or critical) agencies to the
materials.
The consequences of Modernism's overall departure from Romanticism are all around us, but I want to emphasize this one of
Pound the Imagist particularly: he tended to express relationships between things in terms of primarily visual connections
between words, much in the same way that the members of a sculptural group are connected by the viewer. He goes on to
regard words as currency in the sense of possessed of material weight, and, committing the Blakean sin of viewing the eye as an
instrument one sees with rather than through, he spreads his language across the page as though language were sensation, to
reproduce a mental effect or "image." If Pound's self-conscious sensitivity to the semiology of poetry seems the mere sweet
nothings of Pound scholarship, the fact is that many later movements not only inherit the sensitivity but in some cases
(Objectivists, Beats, Black Mountain poets, concretists, Language poets) pass it on. Charles Olson's Maximus, clearly
preoccupied with Imagist technical discoveries, is a thoroughly learned, occasionally great poem, but it is owned by the Cantos
the way Wigglesworth's absurd The Day of Doom seems owned by Paradise Lost. Olsen's preoccupation with the physicality of
language, which he learned from Pound, leads to a kind of gnomic doting over it, and while the ambition is epical, the poetry is
sometimes minimalist babble, or plain bad e. e. cummings. The playful seriousness Ammons brings to writing a "long skinny
poem" on a roll of adding machine tape is the outgrowth of a lapsed Poundian's understanding of history as the history of literary
technique, of "substance running / through shapes of itself,
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/itself the running." A self-consciousness about his own marginality in the medium is part of the poet's success. Clarence
Major's Surfaces and Masks is a more recent derivative:
Smells of fried fish
and grilled steaks
at outdoor table
across from Piazzale Frari.
Italian lessons, anybody?
Inherent in the stepping-down the rungs of prosody to touch the thing is the desire our century learned from Pound, the desire to
record, to experience the technique itself. "To Pound," says the critic Massimo Baciagalupo of this problematic preoccupation,
"a full correspondence between reality and discourse is possible; this elementary mimetic hypothesis he never questions
overtly," and as a result
[Reality] is barred from the Cantos, not because it is "vile," as Mallarmé would have said, but because the page is the sole
actuality, Pound's world is all told in his lines, it is all present, explicit, equally lit. . . . In other words Pound's poetry is
primarily matter.
Pound occasionally and fondly quoted an axiom central to the Medieval nominalist: nomina sunt consequentia rerum, names are
the outcomes of things. The implications for poetry's cognitive value of so wholesale an acceptance of this philosophically
difficult position are that there are no connections between poetry and the "real" world: all poetic speech is therefore a kind of
idiolect.
This disjointedness effects, moreover, a break in the relations between Imagist discursive strategies and the way communication
"really" happens. This break produces a second result and one that appears so often to be the cause of the difficulty encountered
in reading all modern poetry: discursive material, the connective tissue of narrative, gets absorbed, overt links between or among
perceptions are suppressed, historical gestures are compressed into allusions, precedent contexts are buried in titles, blank spaces
(which are after all part of a text's physical design) or footnotesviz., The Waste Land. Even Hemingway, whose "experimental"
period begins and ends with In Our Time (or in our time), buried the details of Catherine and Frederic's lovemaking in the
spaces between the narration (seriatim) and concealed the fact that Catherine is giving Frederic a pre-op enema by leaving stage
direc-
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tions out of the dialogue (chapter 16, A Farewell to Arms). Examples abound. The point is that the aesthetic vision behind the
examples is the Imagist one, which is at bottom driven by a view of words as external things that stand for, do the work of, the
external things they name. That this vision reflects a radical alertness on the part of the writer to private technology (the
typewriter), movies, Cubism, the phonograph, and vaudeville is an interest, but not a decisive one. The twentieth-century's
lusting for a visual prosody does not arrive with Imagism: Mallarmé (Un Coup De Dés) and Apollinaire (Calligrammes), to take
two proximate examples, had already experimented with what Renato Poggioli once called visible lyricism. The question of
concern is how far one can share in this awareness and evaluate it in light of tradition, or of the past. One wants to know how to
read poetry impregnated with concerns so "untraditional" and connected so tenuously with the whole concept of reading.
Which, of course, is exactly the question Pound's letter to cummings raises in its advancing of a visual hygiene of the printed
word. The question is posed more dramatically by Imagism's enabling text, "In a Station of the Metro," which appeared in the
April 1913 issue of Poetry and in a slightly different form in Lustra. In the original version Pound spaces the words apart and
stops the first line with a colon: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd." ''In the 'Metro' hokku," he writes to Harriet
Monroe, "I was careful, I think, to indicate spaces between the rhythmic units, and I want them observed." His directive is stark
in its implications: the spaces between phrases are recovered as units of sound, the eye having first been persuaded that each
(spatiotemporal) unit reposes in isolation from those surrounding it. The eye, in other words, and not the ear, governs meaning.
But what is this poem supposed to sound like? The metrical habits we learn in school help us to assimilate poetry to familiar
anticipatory patterns that yield means of enjoying or at least of analyzing what's new. Yet this two-line poemdecisively not
haikucomes without directions. Instead, it has a physical design that distracts from what one normally expects of poemsrecurrent
patterns of sound. Scanning the first line is useless because it yields either a line of dactylic trimeter (if the scansionist is ready
to elide the first two words and swallow the last syllable of apparition) or some bizarre enforcement of the pentameter (if he is
tone-deaf). Accepting either, moreover, what about
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Petals on a wet, black bough,
a line clearly less dactylic than spondaic? Making the point this way (to borrow a phrase of Pound's) is like dragging your own
heroic corpse around the walls. Each case cancels the next because the poem deliberately sets out to "break the pentameter" and
disable the scansion routines learned in Latin class. Conventional strategies are useless because they are blind to a poem's
physical shapehow do we scan the spaces?yet the unconventional one demanded of us here is somehow too precious. Is it
creditable to give a sonic value to the spaces between the sounds without defining the pause's duration? The "pause" can be in
fact either one of vision or of hearing, Kenner's "perceptual units" and "speakable units'' or Pound's "rhythmic units" at the same
time.
What, moreover, about that hinted off-rhyme (crowd / bough)? And last, what about the tendency of the typology to blur
syntactical assignments? After all, the most confounding element, the one that finally defeats traditional analysis, is that the
poem has no verb. The action that takes place between the seeing of the crowd and the seeing of the petals is unpredicated in
the two senses of the term. No one element performs in both lines to bind them: as with Pound's aphorism, agency (human or
nonhuman) is suppressed. Nor can any element in the strict sense be inferred from the sight of the crowd to the petals: what is
there about apparition to suggest "petals" rather than, say, "raindrops" or "ghosts"? There is no unific Blakean imagination at
work: on one side of the ledger are the crowding "faces," on the other the "petals." What follows the colon is a configuration of
objects physically and psychologically independent of what comes before. Not only is it difficult to describe what goes on but it
is almost impossible to decide what the precise nature of description has come to involve. The destination or direction of what
Philip Wheelright, compelled by this poem to neologize, termed its "semantic motions," is equivocal: the critic cannot say what
the poem says because speech and ordinary telling seem to be but a part of its operations.
I mount this polemical analysis only to demonstrate the scale of real vexation that this two-line poem has provoked since it
appeared. Aside from the wars undertaken by critics foxed in their attempts to find a place for it in the materia of tradition or
the taxonomies of metaphor (the
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card includes Northrop Frye, Hugh Kenner, Philip Wheelright, Terrance Hawkes, and Aristotle: nobody's happy with "oneimage poem"), there is the problem that the poem is obviously about something, though about what, none is dead sure. Kenner
saw a classical topos in the juxtaposed interior (train station) and exterior (petalled bough), a vague fingerprinting of
Persephone's chthonian and ouranean natures. Davie rises to another level of ingenuity with the idea that the two lines
deliberately transpose technical strategies, making the poem be about its own technique. Distressingly, however, Pound had none
of the devices of poetry, speech, rhythm, or measure in view when he experienced his "metro-emotion." Or so he admits in the
passage in Gaudier-Brzeska that has become Modernist homiletic, where he recounts his reaction to getting off the Paris train
one day in 1912 and stepping into the steamy crowd of "beautiful" faces. "I do not mean that I found words, but there came an
equation [...] not in speech, but in little splotches of colour'' (my italics). The emotion, he goes on to explain, required over a
year to discover its proper verbal shape. To describe the shaping dynamic, he fetched out the term "super-position," again from
graphic art. To risk putting too fine a point on it, this slide show of visionary mattes had no literary precedent and apparently
translated so directly from inspiration into visual form one wonders what "reading," here anyway, amounts to.
The question posed by Imagist practice, apart from the theory, is how authentic a contribution to traditional poetic strategies it is.
The Imagist looks for arrangements, for controlled environments of words that represent with physical immediacy his or her
meaning rather than interpretive proxies. So discontinuities of perception spill into typographical arrangement; a square of
asterisks visually alludes to a neon sign (Williams's "The Attic Which Is Desire"), shape alone asserts that a poem is a poem
(Williams's "Poem"), or that it looks like what it is about (Moore's "The Fish"). The extreme implication of such designs is that
each word is each perception: to rearrange the signs is to rearrange the things they stand for. It was this implication that
prompted George Whalley (Poetic Process, 1967), to complain, apropos of all visual models, "I should like to abandon the term
'image' altogether." To the extent to which we understand poems as "linguistic events," Whalley says,
the element of "meaning" must enter, and since utterances can only convey meaning as they unfold themselves in time,
the element of time must enter. . . .
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Criticism, aesthetics, and poetics can profitably recognize that poetry is no more accessible than music, and that Poetic
cannot operate unless the ear is engaged.
Imagist poetics, moreover, at work in poems as different in scale and success as Mauberley and The Waste Land run counter to
what instinct tells us is central to the operations of literary art, and of poetry especially. "Linguistic events," as Whalley remarks,
"are not themselves sensory": poetry speaks through measures of sensuous time and marks mental "events'' in oral memory. "I
made it out of a mouthful of air" means that historical memory is not burdened but released by speech, in speech. A visual
prosody runs in the opposite direction, and transfers the debt that consciousness paid to memory to shaping and spacing, to
footnotes, allusions, headnotes, epigraphs, and the sprawl of signs. The poem is a "linguistic event" at maintenance levelthat of
the page. Recent attempts to reduce poems like Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" to a prosodic core of "two undistinguished
lines of blank verse"
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
misses both Williams's point, which is not the narrowly aesthetic one advanced by the New Aesthetes, and even their own. What
is at issue is not the state of the art or romancing it back to metrical health, but the state of culture, which is the status of human
thought, suddenly thrown into doubt once memory shrinks into what it remembers, becomes the physical "burden of the line,"
and is disengaged from time. The question remains whether Imagism is capable of discovering in subsequent history something
that sustains its most striking innovations.
Between Lustra and the Cantos, Pound's Mauberley (1920) appears as his last attempt to craft a statement of ambition, and
Pound's attention is divided interestingly between the technical and the thematic. Mauberley is so decisively an outgrowth of
Pound's experience as the craftsman of Lustra that it may both productively and accurately be considered, despite the distance of
a half-dozen years or so, as the immediate outcome of Imagist discipline. Pound was tired of London and everything connected
with it and would soon leave for Paris;
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Mauberley is also a leave-taking. A dozen years later Pound recollected how he and Eliot, disgusted with the old formalism of
the Georgians and the new formalism of the Imagists, "at a particular date in a particular room,"
decided that the dilutation of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some
counter-current must be set going. . . . Remedy prescribed "Émaux et Camées" (or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme
and regular strophes.
He was always as interested in the arguments he conducts with the world as in those he conducts with himself, and so produced
a poem that would concentrate his pedagogic passions ("an endeavour to communicate with a blockheaded epoch") in a novel
technical way ("an attempt to condense the James novel").
Pound's approach to the autobiographical novel-in-verse captured his settled affection for the sculptural energies of Gautier's
poetry in Imagism's major insights about juxtapositional narrative. The prosodic result is a DeChirico grouping of some fairly
old-fashioned vers de société around an unnamed thematic center. The indispensable guide to the poem, John Espey's Ezra
Pound's Mauberley (University of California Press, 1974), demonstrates the extent to which Pound was born-again by
reaquaintance with Théophile Gautier's Emaux et Camées, the Greek of Bion, and Robert Browning, the poet who in the long
run may be Pound's truest Penelope. Structurally, the poem, which is in two parts, is a complicated intersecting or superimposing
of two visions, or versions, of Pound himself. Pound as Pound apparently narrates part 1, titled "E.P. Ode Pour L'Election De
Son Sepulchre," the tomb assigned either to Pound or to the persona, Mauberley, who is killed off at the conclusion of the
second part (titled simply "Mauberley"). Each major division embraces a series of disconnected portraits of literary
personalitiesEspey identifies themand over the whole there broods a disembodied cultural voice, a maskless prefiguration of the
Eliot-Tiresias of The Waste Land.
Mauberley extends Lustra's moral preoccupations, with the difference that the prosodic vehicles are different and that Pound,
seizing the opportunity for narrative, tends to type his "characters." It is as though "My Last Duchess" had been written by
someone more interested in interior decoration that in dialogue, attention turned from the drama of
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life and death to the paintings we see going in and to Claus of Innsbruck's bronze seahorse, which we pass on the way out.
Pound goes further in condensing characteristic gestures of voice or personal details than one would imagine possible in a
typical narrative. The two-quatrain sketch that begins
"Conservatrix of Milésien"
Habits of mind and feeling,
Possibly. But in Ealing,
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
(1:11)
is, in a sense, a version of the fate of the girl in "The Garden." All her breeding reduced to trained instincts, "those her
grandmother / Told her would fit her station," she ends up in a conventional suburban situation with a bank clerk. Pound is still
puzzling through the consequences of healthy sexuality oversocialized and overpoliced by conscience. That two of the first line's
three words are not in English notches one crucial difference from "The Garden," and the glib framing of these conversational
rhythms notches another. If not transcripts, these poems are miraculous eavesdroppings into Pound's educated vernacular, with
all its polyglot short-hand and ventriloquism. Like the conventional Imagist poem, Mauberley demands a reader with a literary
intelligence active enough to supply not only the missing external transitions but the internal references as well. The sections
specifically, on the other hand, are formally familiar, their thematic concerns, like those of the Lustra poems, social and moral,
and their overall effect aphoristic:
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
Pound left out the footnotes when his poem first appeared; what results is the first of Modernisms long poems that is nearly
unreadable without them, or a concurrent education in social trivia. This point is worth emphasizing: Mauberley is a portent, not
just of the character but the degree of technical difficulty readers will encounter in later Modernist epics. The result, in Espey's
words, is that "any critic's evaluation of
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Mauberley is in all probability a miniature of his evaluation of the Cantos, with the single qualification that though the strengths
remain constant, the flaws are magnified in the larger work."
The problem of immediate and postponed reference is easily epitomized. Take a famous example from the first part, section 3.
Through seven quatrains Pound moves, balancing his disgust for the present against unqualified praise of the past. A "tea-gown"
is compared to the prized muslin of ancient Cos, a "pianola" to Sappho's "barbitos," Christ to Dionysus, "Faun's flesh'' to the
now mechanically pressed communion wafer, and Pisistratus to our elected "knave or eunuch," all of which ironic pairings
merely lead up to the astonishing final quatrain:
O bright Apollo,
,
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!
The Greek of line 2, from Pindar's Second Olympian Ode, is silently translated by Pound in line 3: six words compress Pindar's
poem and all that Pindar represents into Pound's. For those who can transliterate it, the Greektin andra, tin' heroa, tina
theonsets up a brilliant pun. In one allusion Pound condenses an entire tradition, asserting the disproportion, comically
reminding you, if you get it, that Pindar's poem is a prayer that upon transliteration is absurdly lost in its modern "equivalents"
(tin). The effect is like watching a sleepwalker wake up in a busy intersection; the past cannot survive unwarped transition into
our modernity; Pound wants not only to make the point but, a good Imagist, to dramatize it. The result is radical irony, where
each element comments on without communicating anything to the other. The gross foregrounding of the allusion brings history
into the "plot" of Mauberley, those adding moustaches to the Mona Lisa or bringing live horses on stage already knew the
technique. The problematical difference associated with Mauberley and its successors is that one cannot get the joke unless one
knows Greek. Human indifference appears to rise, moreover, in proportion to the scale of difficulty. In the latest edition of
Ellman and O'Clair's Norton anthology all the key Greek words are misspelled, with the correct letter gnu (here and elsewhere)
replaced by the look-alike upsilon. Pound would have loved the irony.
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Another issue, of at least equal importance to the study of how sources are brought to bear in Pound's work, is why, and the
answer in general has to do with Pound's desire to open the referential textual dimension so that the poet literally carries on his
education in public. The larger structures are related by approximation instead of thematic interpenetration; allusion squeezes
discursive asides into bursts of meaning. The juxtapositional insight of Imagist poetry, or so one might think of it, is nothing
more than the extension of the allusive habit from the level of the line to the stanza. At times, as in the instance of Pindar,
whose meaning is teased into another context, the effect is startling. The technique is in evidence everywhere in Eliot's The
Waste Land, a fact that should surprise no one, given that its editor was an Imagist who had already experimented with elliptical
strategies in Mauberley. In both poems allusions carry internal as well as external vectors. Part 1, section 1 of Mauberley begins,
"For three years, out of key with his time, / He strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry"; section 2, part 2 ("Mauberley")
opens an internal dimension by backhanding the opening of part 1: "For three years, diabolus in the scale, / He drank ambrosia,
/ All passes, ANANGKE prevails." The shared syntactical contours are alive to the difference between the overlapped figures"E.
P.,'' whom we may as well identify with the author himself, and his Shelleyan antitype, "Mauberley," who discontentedly
dissipated his spiritual treasure while Pound strove to raise the dead. True accuracy concedes subtle differences, of course: Eliot
solves the issue of thematic interpenetration by encircling his poem with Tiresias, his persona; The Waste Land is at bottom a
dramatic monologue whose original title ("He Do the Police in Different Voices"), odious or not, is still its most decisive gloss.
Mauberley, though, is a bit harder to characterize. A Bert-and-Ernie correlation of The Waste Land and Mauberley would notch
obvious differences: in genre (dramatic and narrative), point-of-view, prosody (Eliot's vers libristic and Pound's formalist),
illocutionary setting (Eliot includes footnotes, Pound does not), and so forth. But the decisive difference is thematic and tonal,
and an opportunity to boldface that difference is in the apparent coincidence that both poems contain an allusion to the same line
of Dante: "Siena mi fe'; disfecemi Maremma." In Dante's original the lines are spoken by Pia de Tolmei, whose husband, the
Duke of Siena, murdered her in their castle: "Sienna," her home-
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town, "made me, and Maremma," her husband's, "unmade me." Eliot's translation of the line is less that than
traduction"Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me" (29394, "The Fire Sermon")to which he adds a simple pointer to
"Purgatorio 5:133,'' of which Eliot's distich is a pastiche. Pound gives us no note and uses the line as the title of the second of
the four portraits that comprise section 5 of part 1 of Mauberley:
Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,
Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion of the
Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
Scholarship reveals that the model for Verog is Victor Plarr (18631929), friend of Yeats, fellow Rhymer, and biographer of
Lionel Johnson. The poem fills four quatrains with Verog's reminiscences and concludes with a bittersweet salut
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries,
which suggests to whoever, unassisted by notes, has unearthed Dante's presence in the poem, that Plarr/Verog was "seduced"
from Strasbourg to England and "unmade" by the change but decent enough in the end. One turns from Pound's to Eliot's poem
with undisguised shock:
"Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."
The voice, Tiresias's, conflates all the female voicesMarie ("Marie, hold on tight"), Madame Sosostris, Mrs. Porter, Lil,
Cleopatra, the typist home at tea-time, and even Vivien Eliot ("My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me."). But Eliot's
deployment of Dante is so different from Pound's we may see in it an index of radical creative displacement. Like Pound's use of
Pindar, Eliot's englishing of Dante produces a brilliant pun ("Undid me"), but unlike Pound, Eliot positions Dante in such a way
that Dante's Pia is absorbed into Eliot's
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proxy and stages the ironic confrontation of past and present without surrendering Eliot's lasting obsession in The Waste Land
with the rootlessness of human desire, which explains the violated character of modern sexual pleasure. By simple contrast
Pound permits the line's resonances to continue in both directions, neither containing nor excluding any and thereby highlighting
Pound's lasting obsession, the tragic obliteration of historical memory. His technique points outward, always toward the
readership with which he could never break off arguing.
For all of its satirical compression and experimental enthusiasm, Lustra ends on a note of earnest nostalgia for the past.
"Provincia Deserta" is one of those strange poems where Pound nearly discloses the subjective interests he spent his career
retrofitting as technical goals. He ruminates over a walking tour he made through Provence in 1913, but given the satirical beat
of the rest of the book his earnestness seems misplaced. The poem, about walking and looking at what is and is no longer there,
moves by an unusual logic of predication. Line after line begins with "I have walked" or ''I have seen" or a similar expression.
The tone in fact is formulaic, a series of declarations with an eerie likeness to the visionary syntax of Enoch's Gospel or
Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre where the rhetorical emphasis is evenly divided between subject and object, Seer and what he sees at
once. So each line names something observed or heard, but, unusually for Pound, each leaves the reader's attention suspended. Is
it "the stream full of lilies" or the fact that Pound "peered down" into it that is important? The goal of all this irresolution is not
immediately clear. A sentimental journey? Filler? There is in fact something sentimental about all of it, especially the ending:
So ends that story.
That age is gone;
Pieire de Maensac is gone.
I have walked over these roads;
I have thought of them living.
In a book where the poems are told to "go" here or there as though they were children, walking is a word alive with
suggestiveness, and a prosody that steps line by line down the world is imitating right down to tone Pound's own careful ritual
of rediscovery in Provence. More to
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the point is that this book dramatizes Pound's discovery of his own poetic fatherings and by that much feels suddenly prepared
to be "let in," admitted to the tradition whose best sights and sounds he has prayerfully repeated. These are not places but
shrines; I have walked, he says, roads that are both the country roads of Provence and the paths of traditional virtù, and all along
I have thought of them "as living." Now then, we might imagine him thinking (though not saying aloud), now that I have done
this, I would be made part of it. Let me in.
If there is a tragic aspect to the Imagist project, it is its neurotic fixation upon historical continuity and the concurrent anxiety
over a history emptied of meaning, a province deserted by what gave it meaning in the first place. History was to the Modernist
the opportunity that Nature was to the Romantic, a chance to wrest the personal from the impersonal. None seized it with greater
passion than Pound or the American poetry that succeeded him. American poetry primarily: Modernism is a provocation to
thinking of authenticity, intentionality, historicity, and chronological personality, and the provocation issues from an American
preoccupation with historical legitimacy. (A stand-alone category of Modern British Poetry is, outside of course catalogues and
period designations, simply unimaginable.) To think of tradition the way Nick Carraway thought of personality, "as a series of
unbroken gestures," was a blessing reserved for those whose ethnocentric sleeps were undisturbed by the nightmare of
rootlessness and immigration that at some point intercepts the work of every American poet in this century. It still does. The
American contribution, a self-consciousness about origins and history's design, produced an impossible goal: the recording of
objective history, history as it was, in poetry, which of all media of human expression is the most overdetermined by
subjectivity. Personal intention and traditional authenticity, doubled into a unified obsession over what Pound called either
integrity or sincerity, bedeviled his work. At the same time, and like every other twentieth-century writer who has followed
Shelley's lead, Pound worried about the cognitive value of art, about the kind of information a poem might expedite to a public
that he envisioned, and with terrible urgency, seducing to his side.
J. T. Barbarese
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Further Reading
Baciagalupo, Massimo. The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York Columbia University Press, 1980
Bernstein, Michael André. The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Ezra Pound. New York Chelsea House.
Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Pound, Ezra. A. B. C. of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960.
The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1970.
Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 19091965. Ed., with an introduction by William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.
Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. Rev. ed. New York: New Directions, 1970.
The Letters of Ezra Pound: 19071941. Ed. D. D. Paige. New York Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1950.
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed., with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. New York New Directions, 1968.
Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. Rev. ed. Ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York New Directions, 1990.
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T. S. Eliot
For his graduation exercises at Smith Academy, in St. Louis, Thomas Stearns Eliot composed and recited a poem of fourteen
rhymed stanzas in which appropriately lofty and inspiring sentiments were uttered about youth, age, the road of life, sons
departing the school to which they would returnchanged but still loyal; most grandly, about the modern world:
Great duties callthe twentieth century
More grandly dowered than those which came before,
Summonswho knows what time may hold in store.
Five years or so later, having graduated from Harvard and having read some French poets, notably Jules Laforgue, Eliot was
writing lines like the following:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient men and women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
From an expansive, large-souled looker into the future and what it held for mankind's great destiny, he had become an imagistic
ironist, still making grand and mysterious gestures ("The worlds revolve like ancient men and women / Gathering fuel") but now
in an unillusioned manner. It was the "modern" note, that note which initially strikes a reader picking up Eliot's poetry.
Or so it struck this reader when as an undergraduate I read to myself and read aloud the opening lines of "The Love Song of J.
Alfred
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Prufrock": "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table."
"You and I''who are we and what sort of relationship is this? "When the evening is spread out against the sky"when exactly does
that occur and how can one tell? "Like a patient etherised upon a table"how is the evening "like" an etherised patient and what
does such a likeness portend? In fact I didn't ask these questions, didn't pause and shake my head in dismay over them but
instead read on, either pretending the difficulties were only temporary and would be resolved or electing to hear what the poet
would say next, what new strange collocation of details would puzzle and excite. Sure enough, within a few lines occurs the
infamous couplet"In the room the women come and go, / Talking of Michelangelo"utterly memorable, but what did it mean?
That whatever sort of women they are in whatever sort of room, coming and going, they are, all of them, talking of
Michelangelo. But what are they saying and what does it have to do with the "sawdust restaurants with oyster shells" just
preceding or the patient etherised upon a table with which we began? Is it an unworthy thing to do, to talk of
Michelangelohorribly supertidal perhaps? But we are told nothing of how the talk is conducted, in what accents or at what level
of perception; no more than with the sawdust restaurants and its oyster shells are we given clear signals on how to regard the
talking women. But we remember the couplet in which they appear.
Or so thinks one of the "we" who learned to read poetry during the age of Eliot, an age that began in the early 1920s, when
"Prufrock" and The Waste Land and a number of influential critical essays had given him a reputation as the significant poetcritic of his time. That significance only widened until his death in 1965, even though after Four Quartets (1943) he had ceased
almost entirely to write poetry. To a college student in the 1950s Eliot's name was magic, the source of profound wisdom about
the chaos of modern civilization and the difficultiesthe impossibilitiesof successful communication between human beings. Even
as we struggled in our lives, sometimes with pretty good results, to know and love some other people, Eliot's work was there as
a great looming warning, a grim shaking of the head at the vanity and fragility of human wishes and aspirations. "Between the
idea and the reality . . . Falls the shadow," he told us in The Hollow Men, and the words reverberated. And while his poetry was
revered as a source of
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disenchanted wisdom about life, his critical and historical pronouncements in The Sacred Wood and Selected Essays, his
valuations and comparisons of writers past and present, were deployed in countless undergraduate and graduate English papers.
Notions of tradition, or the dissociated sensibility that had overtaken English poetry in the seventeenth century, or the "objective
correlative" that Shakespeare in Hamlet was unable to discoverthese Eliotic formulations were invoked by way of giving
authority to whatever argument we were attempting to make. Less important to us were the late attempts at social and religious
polemicthe books about culture (Notes Towards the Definition of Culture) and religion (The Idea of a Christian Society) where
Eliot spelled out, with maximum qualification and circumspection, his exclusionary notions of life in a world he said was
"worm-eaten with liberalism." Nor, despite the popular success of The Cocktail Party, did the plays command our lively
attention. It was the small body of poems and a selection of essays from a much wider spread of prose writings, that constituted
his powerful appeal.
The question is whether the appeal is still felt by teachers and students in the last decade of this century. (I am assuming there
does not exist a younger nonacademic reading public for Eliot's writings.) His death coincided with a time when American poets
were becoming more responsive to William Carlos Williams's experiments in the American grain than to the "classical" values
Eliot espoused and the by then too-familiar poems that had made his reputation. And as Wallace Stevens's body of work became
increasingly influential, asunder the critical authority of Harold Bloom and Helen Vendlerhis status as our most important poet
was asserted, Eliot's reputation enjoyed no comparable enriching. In fact there was a perceptible decline in the capacity of his
poetry to make a difference in people's lives. His centennial was celebrated in 1988, and the novelist Cynthia Ozick, writing in
the New Yorker the following year, put the matter in a way that was accurate in its estimation of how the winds have been
blowing, though it was also excessive and melodramatic in its overall tone.
In the early seventies, it was still possible to uncover, here and there, a tenacious English Department offering a vestigial
graduate seminar given over to the study of Eliot. But by the close of the eighties only "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" appears to have survived the indifference of the schoolsas two or three pages in the anthologies, a fleeting
assignment for high-school
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seniors and college freshmen. "Profrock," and "Profrock" alone, is what the latest generations know (barely know); not
"The Hollow Men," not "La Figlia che Piange," not ''Ash-Wednesday"not even "The Waste Land." Never "Four Quartets."
And the mammoth prophetic presence of T. S. Eliot him-selfthat immortal, sovereign rockthe latest generation do not
know at all.
Having herself been one of the generation that eagerly discovered Eliot, Ozick feels saddened by the loss, but she is also
unhappy at the reactionary nature of Eliot's political and social attitudes, and she ends her essay by informing us solemnly that it
is our "unsparing obligation to dismiss the reactionary Eliot," even as we will probably miss forever "the golden cape of our
youth, the power and prestige of high art."
Ozick's conclusion is put forth in a more self-important tone than Eliot used about himself (he once told an audience that since
he had a reputation for "affecting pedantic precision" he should not like to lose it). But even more misguided is her attempt to
make Eliot less disagreeable to the liberal conscience by telling us we must "dismiss" his reactionary opinions. Surely the
business of a good reader consists in something other than condemning qualities in a writer that don't square with certifiably
correct morals and politics. If we are uneasy about some or all of Eliot's references to Jewsabout, say, his pronouncement in
After Strange Gods (1934) that since a traditional society needs to be homogeneous, "reasons of race and religion combine to
make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable"we should analyze and judge the remark by putting it in relation to
comparable assertions and ideas in Eliot's prose and verse. Dismissing it is no more called for than embracing it, and the same
may be said of controversial and disturbing moments in the writings of (among others) Milton, Tolstoy, and D.H. Lawrence. It
may even be the case that a great writer's power is commensurate with his power to offend.
But I am less interested in quarreling with Ozick than in qualifying her assumption that "the latest generation" doesn't at all
know Eliot's poetry. Without asking which poet it is the latest generation knows well, it can be said that over the years and right
up through a just completed semester numbers of students have read Eliot with me in courses called Modern Poetry, Modern
British Poetry, and Modern American Poetry, and these students have found him no less difficult or less interesting than they
find Yeats or Stevens, Robert Lowell or Elizabeth Bishop. Ozick's reading of the world-cultural poetry barometer that
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registers who's high and who's low must be corrected by the insistence that at least at one collegeand I suspect at many
moreEliot is alive and well, his poems, and to some extent his criticism, seriously and satisfyingly engaged with by members of
the latest generation.
My attempt in the following pages is to speak not as an impartial, objective observer of the poetry scene, as this century nears its
termination, but rather as a critic and teacher who values and is moved by Eliot's work as a whole and who finds parts of it to be
of supreme literary quality. While I don't mean to tag certain poems as exclusively the ones in which that quality can be found, I
shall mainly focus on three of them from different stages in Eliot's career"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste
Land, and Four Quartetsand on the criticism he wrote in the years roughly from 1917 to 1922.
"Prufrock," with the help of Ezra Pound, was first published in Poetry in 1915, but it was written in 191011, the year Eliot spent
abroad, mainly in Paris. It is often pointed out that, as with "Portrait of a Lady," written during the same period, its milieu is
Boston. Yet "Prufrock" is the sort of poem that refuses to be located in one topographical cityscape or another, and, in fact,
Eliot's biographer, Peter Ackroyd, terms the "yellow fog" in the poem a St. Louis one. Its landscape is, for want of a better
word, psychological, and in perhaps the poem's moment of greatest feeling its protagonist wonders if "it would have been worth
it, after all'' to have made some large annunciation to the woman, the "she" who lolls and entertains him amidst marmalade and
cups of tea. "After" (a key reiterated word in the poem) these and many other pieces of worldly furniture are enumerated,
Prufrock suddenly exclaims,
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.
To say "just" what you mean would be presumably to move beyond the excitements and inadequacies of metaphor into the
realm of truth, where words mean precisely what they saya world exactly contrary to the poetic one Eliot creates.
It is as if we were to look at a series of nerve patterns and as if somehow these constituted not a composite visual shape but a
musical performance, indeed a love song. "Prufrock" has no plot, no narrative with
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a beginning, middle, and end; its characters aren't characters but nervous ghosts who mysteriously appear and disappear as
elusively as the yellow fog that slides along its street. In the course of various formulations, or half-formulations, the "I," who
tells us he has "known" just about everything, decides that he doesn't dare disturb the universe, that he shouldn't "presume" to
begin to do anything, that probably he "should have been a pair of ragged claws," that he is not a prophet (even if he's seen his
own slightly balding head brought in on a platter), that he really can't manage to pass as either a Lazarus or a Hamlet figure, that
he's "almost'' (but not quite?) ridiculous, almost (capitalized) "the Fool." Finally, that the mermaids won't sing to him whether he
eats a peach and wears white flannel trousers or whether he doesn't. What I'm suggesting by this cavalier assembling of the
"facts" about J. Alfred Prufrock is that there aren't any facts, that the "content" of the poem is really a hoaxor rather an occasion
for a voice to make haunting music.
To hear that music one must read the poem aloud to a friend, to a class of students, or declaim it silently to the listener within. I
can think of no single piece of writing more wholly dependent for its effect on the "performance" that R. P. Blackmur once said
was the only way to know literature "afresh""in reading and seeing and hearing what is actually in it at this place and this time."
For example, one of the important ways Eliot exercises a hold on our ears is to make sequences out of repetitions that don't
quite repeat, as in the three quietly lengthening verse paragraphs (from six lines to seven to eight) in the middle of the poem,
beginning with "For I have known them all already, known them all." Recall the closing questions in each unit: "So how should I
presume?" And how should I presume?" "And how should I begin" (that last one preceded by "And should I then presume?").
Or recall the echoing "And would it have been worth it, after all, / Would it have been worth while," and the copresence, but in
varying patterns, of other echoes echoing: "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all";
"That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.'" What in a reading aloud is heard as ingeniously melodic, subtly
compelling, refuses to be carried over into the sentences of a quoting critic at his typewriter.
A contemporary English critic, Barbara Everett, once wrote that the voice in "Prufrock" (it makes more sense to say in
"Profrock" the poem rather than of Prufrock the character) manages to hold us through its spellbinder's charm. This spell,
though, is very much an aural one,
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depending less upon any sense or point about life that is madebeyond the general declaration of weary futility, of having come
too late and missed out on everythingthan on the seductive drawn-out repetitions, the music of consonantal and vowel echoings.
Indeed the theme of weary futility is contradicted by the vitality of the verbal, aural performance. An example from the first of
two tercets about the mermaids that end the poem:
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
This is really not so much a vision as it is something heard, from "seen" to "seaward," from "waves" to ''white" to "waves" to
"when" to "wind" to "water" to "white," from "blown back" to "blows . . . black"an auditory tour de force, surely. For all Eliot's
explicitly acknowledged debt in "Prufrock" and the other early poems to Laforgue ("My early vers libre, of course, was started
under the endeavor to practice the same form as Laforgue. This meant merely rhyming lines of irregular length, with the rhymes
coming in irregular places"), it is the English Tennyson of "The Lotos Eaters" these lines recall:
but evermore
Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
And rather than asking exactly what the mermaids are doing out there (aside from "combing"), we experience the doing as an
effect registered memorably by someone who has "lingered in the chambers of the sea" as Eliot did in the echo chambers of this
poem. The astonishing thing about "Prufrock" is, of course, how it has continued to speak to the most unlikely readers. Or
maybe there is no such thing as an unlikely reader: writing about teaching literature in a community college Clara Clairborne
Park remembers one of her students telling her, "I must have read that poem fifty times . . . I am J. Alfred Prufrock." Of such is
the power of "a piece of rhythmical grumbling"Eliot's own phrase about The Waste Land, but even more applicable to
"Prufrock"to cast a spell over the responsive ear.
In "The Frontiers of Criticism," Eliot's 1956 lecture delivered to fourteen thousand people gathered in the baseball stadium at the
University of
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Minnesota, he said, in a typically self-deprecatory disclaimer, "I fail to see any critical movement which can be said to derive
from myself." Perhaps the disclaimer is not so much self-deprecatory as a proud fending off of those who come after Eliot the
true original: how could you think (we might conceive him saying) that I can be held responsible for this or that critical
procedure or movement? In fact, for all the academic recycling of Eliotic terms that occurred in the 1940s and 1950s, Eliot's
critical convictions and principles do not take kindly to being passed along. We may speak of some critic as a Poundian or
Leadsite or a follower of Yvor Winters (Wintersian?) but never as an Eliotian or even a follower of Eliot. This has to do with
the absence in Eliot of a systematic critical method ("the only method is to be very intelligent," he said in his preface to The
Sacred Wood) or a prescribed method for conducting literary analysis, which we find, to one degree or another, in Pound and
Leavis and Winters. As for Eliot's much-used terms, which have had such a strong, even notorious life, they have by now all
been thoroughly and adversely criticized; no critic today would use "dissociation of sensibility" or "objective correlative"
without the most elaborate qualification.
Still, Eliot remains the major poet-critic of our century, taking a rightful place in the line from Ben Jonson to Dryden, Samuel
Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold. The last-named was felt by Eliot as his immediate predecessor, whose work, while it
deserved much respect, had also to be firmly placed in perspective. So in introducing his first volume of criticism, The Sacred
Wood, Eliot saluted Arnold's plea for a criticism that would complement and make more self-aware the work of poets. He
agrees with Arnold that this work had not been sufficiently done for the Romantics, nor, by implication, for the poets who were
currently writing in English one hundred years later. But he wishes also that Arnold had been more of a practical critic; that he
had, in Eliot's examples, taken it upon himself to compare Thackeray with Flaubert, or analyzed Dickens and compared him
with George Eliot and Stendhal. Instead Arnold spent too much of his time "attacking the uncritical" and concerned himself
more with matters of culture, society, and religion than with literary ones. About which Eliot remarks, adducing his
contemporaries H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton, "The temptation, to any man who is interested in ideas and primarily in
literature, is to put literature into the corner until he cleaned up the whole country first." So his judgment was that Arnold was
more a "propagandist for criticism" than a critic.
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Eliot didn't begin by attempting to clean up the whole country; in fact it was not until after his assuming editorship of the
Criterion in 1922and especially after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927that his interest shifted from the comparison
and analysis of individual writers and literary works to (in words from his preface to the second, 1928, edition of The Sacred
Wood) "the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times." His most productive, most brilliant
years as a "pure" critic of literature were the ones in which his creative work floweredfrom the publication of Prufrock and
Other Observations in 1917 to The Waste Land in 1922. After that, although he wrote a number of fine essays about particular
writers (perhaps most notably about Dante, Samuel Johnson, Byron, Tennyson, and Yeats), those for which he is most strongly
remembered had their birth within a fairly small range of years. (A list of them would include essays on Marlowe, Jonson,
Hamlet, Philip Massinger, the Metaphysicals, Maryell, Dryden, Blake, and Swinburne.)
Often in the briefest of compasses, Eliot can make a brilliant redirection of our sense of a writer. For example, the Swinburne
essay is only six pages long, but these are pages in which, as Eliot says approvingly about Aristotle in "The Perfect Critic," he is
"swiftly operating the analysis of sensation to the point of principle and definition." In a series of lightninglike comparisons of
lines from Swinburne's verse with lines from that of Thomas Campion, Shakespeare, and Shelley, Eliot establishes his point
about how Swinburne's genius was to identify meaning and sound, to present "emotion" that is "never particular, never in direct
line of vision, never focussed"emotion reinforced by ''expansion." A moment from these comparisons may suggest Eliot's typical
operation in his essays and reviews. He is about to compare Swinburne with Shakespeare, then with Wordsworth:
It is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not the object. When you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you find
always that the object was not thereonly the word. Compare
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
with the daffodils that come before the swallow dares. The snowdrop of Swinburne disappears, the daffodil of
Shakespeare remains. The swallow of Shakespeare remains in the verse of Macbeth; the bird of Wordsworth
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Breaking the silence of the seas
remains; the swallow of "Itylus" disappears.
This is dazzling, virtually sleight-of-hand. Fully to register these comparisons a reader would have to remember Swinburne's
"Before the Mirror" (whence the snowdrops), then lines from act 4 of The Winter's Tale about the daffodils, then think of the
"temple-haunting martlet" (the "swallow" in Macbeth that Duncan invokes as he prepares to enter Macbeth's castle), then
Wordsworth's nightingale in "The Solitary Reaper," and finally the evanescence of Swinburne's swallow (''Swallow, my sister, O
sister swallow"). Whether anyone is able or likely to do all this even as he or she ponders the convincingness of Eliot's
comparisons, is doubtful. More likely we may just nod agreement, impressed by the breezy authority with which the critic
proceeds to his conclusion that in Swinburne's verse "the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning, because language,
uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment."
Eliot's practical criticism, as instanced in the particularly telescoped example of it, is seldom or never a matter of patient analysis
of a poem but rather of provocative assertion and invitations to compare one poem or series of lines with another. It is
invigorating to read him partly because the twists of his discourse (not typically a soberly conducted "argument") have the
surprise and originality of poetry itself. He likes to strew difficulties in the paths of his readers and himselfanything to make
things other than cut and dried. In the following sentences from a never-reprinted Athenaeum review of 1919, "The Education of
Taste," he sets out the difficulties that lie in the way of the practicing critic who must make decisions about how to operate:
To communicate impressions is difficult; to communicate a coordinated system of impressions is more difficult; to
theorize demands vast ingenuity, and to avoid theorizing requires vast honesty.
The neat movement here from theorizing to the avoidance of theorizing, then the capping reference to "generality" in which
earlier terms like impression and honesty are brought back, has the force of true wit, Oscar Wilde crossed by Matthew Arnold.
And Eliot is especially vigilant toward well-known literary terms a naive, insufficiently disillusioned poet or critic might rely
onterms like "technique." In prefacing the second edition of The Sacred Wood he takes us around the mul-
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berry bush by beginning with a definition of poetry thatlike Swift's definition of good prose as "proper words in proper
places"says everything and not much of anything in particular. Poetry, Eliot writes, consists of "excellent words in excellent
arrangement and excellent metre." But what more can be said?
That is what is called the technique of verse. But we observe that we cannot define even the technique of verse; we cannot
say at what point "technique" begins or where it ends; and if we add to it a "technique of feeling," that glib phrase will
carry us only a little farther. We can only say that a poem, in some sense, has its own life.
In other words there is no shortcut, indeed no road through to certainty in literary matters. We can only say that "in some sense"
a poem has its own life; or we can say, in Eliot's echo of Bishop Butler, that in considering poetry "we must consider it
primarily as poetry and not another thing." Or, in that same playfull preface to The Sacred Wood, we may agree that poetry is "a
superior amusement.'' Is that a sufficient definition? Not at all:
I do not mean an amusement for superior people. I call it an amusement, an amusement pour distraire les honnêtes gens,
not because that is a true definition, but because if you call it anything else you are likely to call it something still more
false. If we think of the nature of amusement, then poetry is not amusing; but if we think of anything else that poetry may
seem to be, we are led into fax greater difficulties.
Such sidestepping and ducking has its perils, and in his later prose Eliot would succumb to them, as in the often lugubrious
fussings of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. But they also tease and refresh our minds in salutary ways.
Eliot performed similar services with regard to words like tradition, rhetoric, satireperhaps most importantwit, the promotion of
which quality into a major one for great poetry may be his most forceful contribution to literary criticism. In "Andrew Marvell"
(1921) he made a memorable attempt to defineeven as he deprecated the possibility of clearly defining itthat quality of wit
which distinguished Marvell's work and which over the course of subsequent centuries had been nearly absent from English
poetry. Eliot's account claims that the seventeenth century took the "high" style developed in Marlowe and Jonson and separated
it out into qualities of wit and magniloquence. While
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allowing that the terms are fluid, and that the style of Marvell, Cowley, Milton and others often showed these qualities blended,
he attempts to distinguish Caroline wit from what followed it:
The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt,
or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust. What is meant is some quality which is
common to the songs in Comus and Cowley's Anacreontics and Marvell's Horatian Ode. It is more than a technical
accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough
reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace. You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth; you cannot find more
than an echo of it in Landor, still less in Tennyson or Browning; and among contemporaries Mr. Yeats is an Irishman and
Mr. Hardy is a modern Englishmanthat is to say, Mr. Hardy is without it and Mr. Yeats is outside of the tradition
altogether.
It can be found, he goes on to add, in Laforgue and Gautier, two poets Eliot had managed to make use of in his own work
during the decade that had just concluded.
Such an account is itself a specimen of wit, right down to the lyric grace of naming those three great masters of contempt,
hatred, and disgust, and the tough reasonablenessor so it pretends to beof excluding both Hardy and Yeats from any
consideration in these terms. Like most exciting passages in Eliot's criticism, we read and silently correct its overstatements: we
can find wit in some of Keats, even in Shelley occasionally; we know that the dismissal of Yeats and Hardy is too sweeping,
unfair. But as Eliot's friend Wyndham Lewis reminds us, satire is always unfair, and Eliot's early criticism is never far from a
satiricor at least a mischievously subversiveperspective on things. "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because
we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." These sentences from "Tradition and the
Individual Talent" might be turned upon Eliot's own criticism insofar as its formulations have entered the bloodstream of later
generations of readers who were helped to become critics by having to move beyond the Eliot criticism that they knew.
With the publication of the first volume of Eliot's letters, reaching to the end of 1922, we have a rich particular sense of what we
knew only
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in outline before: that his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915 became progressively more painful and that both his health
and hers worsened. In his case a "breakdown" occurred in 1921 when he took rest cures, first in Margate, then in Lausanne,
Switzerland, even as he was finishing The Waste Land. Epistolary Eliot was able at times to take a sardonically humorous
perspective on his problems, saying that he felt himself to be "living in one of Dostoyevsky's novels, you see, not in one of Jane
Austen's," or assuring a correspondent that his health wasn't all that bad: "My teeth are falling to pieces, I have to wear
spectacles to read, and from time to time I am contorted with rheumatismotherwise I am pretty well." Meanwhile Vivien was
writing his mother about the deplorable condition of ''Tom's" wardrobe ("his old underwear is still thick and in fair condition,
but it needs incessant darning. Darning alone takes me hours out of the week"), especially his lack of pyjamas: "He is still
worse provided with pyjamas than anything. . . . He is very rough with his pyjamas, and shirtstears them unmercifully."
It is of interest then to contemplate this hapless creature (as Eliot and his wife present him to others) carrying out brilliantly
various public roles in the years 19171921: working efficiently in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd's Bank, teaching
night school and extension courses in English literature, turning out enormous amounts of journalism for the Egoist and
Athenaeum, and (in his spare time, one might say) assembling a second volume of verse, Poems 1920, consisting, most
importantly, of "Gerontion." "Gerontion" is Eliot's bleakest, chilliest, most inaccessible poem, virtually "unreadable" by the
procedures we use to read more conventional works. It is Eliot at his most complicatedly and concentratedly allusive as well as
his most elusive. What are we to make of a monologue (if it is that) which in seeming to draw itself together near the end
proffers the following sentiment"I would meet you upon this honestly"in which there is no credible "I," in which the "you"
doesn't exist, and in which the adverb "honestly" can't be credited as accurately modifying any credible verb? The referential
currency of such a line is about equal to that possessed by the figuresno more than names, reallywho momentarily surface in the
poem, then just as mysteriously disappear, as Hakagawa bows among the Titians, as Madame de Tornquist shifts the candles,
and as Fräulein von Kulp turns in the hall, one hand on
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the door. Gerontion, whoever "he" may be, puts it thus: "Vacant shutties weave the wind." The weaving and unweaving of
verbal patterns in Eliot's most relentlessly verbal poem has the effect, so it seems to this reader, of rendering the large windy
portents about Christianity and history less rather than more intelligible. As always in Eliot, the poem has wonderfully
memorable lines, especially those from the section about history that begins "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" But they
don't contribute to a meditation that sustains itself in moral content as well as in rhetorical flourish. "Whenever a character in
Shakespeare makes a direct appeal to us,'' Eliot wrote in" 'Rhetoric' and Poetic Drama," "we are either the victims of our own
sentiment, or we are in the presence of a vicious rhetoric." That he was aware of this assertion in relation to "Gerontion" and
that he set out to have the poem's speaker expose himself as fraudulent, is conceivable, yet doubtful. We should remember that
he seriously considered using the poem as prologue to The Waste Land, desisting only when Pound told him he must not.
I should prefer to think that the harassed Eliotcaught in a painful marriage, overworked, plagued by bad teeth and eyesight,
contorted by rheumatism, pajamas falling to pieces, living in, as it were, a novel by Dostoyevskycheered himself up by seeing
himself in the dramatic light of a poem, as he said Othello was really cheering himself up in his speech before he stabs himself:
He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and he is thinking about himself. . . .
Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude,
dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in
himself.
The question is perhaps whether either Gerontion or "Gerontion" succeeds in taking us in, without the five acts of tortuous
dramatic development Shakespeare subjects Othello to and that makes his final end so moving. My answer is that brilliant as the
poem is it lacks the humor and humanity of "Prufrock." And for all its evocation of aridity, of "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry
season," it fails to take us in, to take hold of us the way Eliot was about to do in The Waste Land.
But how does The Waste Land "take hold"? Not so many years ago it seemed important to try to loosen the poem from the
interpretive structures critics had attached to it; there was so much "scaffolding"to use
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Cleanth Brooks's word about what his own influential essay on the poem providedthat it was all but impossible to see the object
the scaffolding surrounded. Now, much of that surrounding material has fallen away or has become so inert that it's simply no
longer of interest. Few critics these days deal with the poem by applying the Fisher King legend, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to
Romance, or Frazer's The Golden Bough. It was of course Eliot himself in his introductory note who attached these books and
legends to the poem, but the notes to The Waste Land are a kind of playful poetry themselves. It is Eliot's superior amusement,
for example, to remind us that the hermit-thrush in "What the Thunder Said" is "Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii," that he's heard
it in Quebec Province, and that ''its 'water-dripping song' is justly celebrated." Eliot's notes, if not taken too seriously, are
harmless and sometimes amusing. But other sorts of notes or glosses adhering to the poem, whether they exist in, say, The
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry or in the mind of an individual reader, can be more insidious, more inhibiting to creative,
responsive reading. I am thinking of a gloss such as Norton gives to the Baudelaire allusion at the end of part 1, "The Burial of
the Dead": "You: hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable,mon frere!" After identifying the source, the editor says that "with this line
Baudelaire and Eliot assault the reader and draw him accusingly into the same plight as themselves." The problem with this
assertion is, of course, that after reading the footnote no sensible reader is going to feel the least bit assaulted. It's just one more
allusion to store untroubled in the mind and then read on. Or consider the moment when the narrator, regarding the morning
crowd flowing over London Bridge, suddenly recognizes someone named Stetson and addresses him as "You who were with me
in the ships at Mylae!" The anthology note identifies Mylae as a battle in the first Punic War between Rome and Carthage, then
says that "it merges with the First World War, in which the speaker and Stetson fought; both wars are seen as pointless and
futile." This is an example of an editorial anxiety to fill in the blanks which the poem so carefully does not fill in: we are told
neither that these figures fought in the First World War nor that the war was pointless. (And ifas Eliot's own note claimsall the
poem's "characters" merge into Tiresias, it's hard to see how, being blind, he could have fought in any war.)
Samuel Johnson's wisdom about notes should be remembered, when in his editorial preface to Shakespeare he wrote, "Particular
passages are
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cleared by notes, but the general effect of the work is weakened. The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are
diverted from the principle subject." A poem such as The Waste Land as much as a Shakespeare play suffers when the reading
of it is constantly interrupted by a recurrence to notes or their equivalent. What we need to work at instead is keeping the poem
moving, paying attention to the sequence; above all, listening to the voicesfor it is voices in motion that make up the poem's
substance. Again, Johnson's advice to the reader of Shakespeare is wholly appropriate to reading Eliot:
Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of
the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and
read the commentators.
Another way of puffing it is Wyndham Lewis's way, when, decades ago, he said about Joyce's Ulysses, recently published, "No
one who looks at it will ever want to look behind it." Lewis was paying grudging tribute to the incredibly rich surface Joyce's
book presents to the reader. And Eliot himself, in his essay of 923, "Ulysses: Order and Myth," said that Joyce had given him
"all the surprise, delight, and terror that I can require." We may presume that these qualities emanated from looking at and
listening to the surface of Ulysses, rather than from probing the depths of Joyce's thought or discovering deep meanings
supposedly hidden in his book. During the time he wrote The Waste Land Eliot was preoccupied with what he called, in his
1919 essay on Ben Jonson, "poetry of the surface.'' Many of the things he admired in Jonson's dramatic art he named in terms
that could equally well apply to the art of The Waste Land: "simplified characters," a "flat distortion" in the drawing, "an art of
caricature," "a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours"one could
go on. "We cannot call a man's work superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot be accused of dealing
superficially with the world which he himself has created; the superficies is the world," wrote Eliot, summing it all up by calling
Jonson's drama "a titanic show." The phrase would not be amiss as a collective name for the different "shows" of which The
Waste Land is composed, whether as conducted at Madame Sosostris's or on London Bridge, or round behind the gashouse, or
in the typist's flat.
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The challenge lies in saying something relevant and appropriate to these surfaces without saying too much, without foisting a
burden of "meaning" on the poem (as do explanatory footnotes, often) that makes it merely portentous. Consider the marvelous
and scary utterances of the "neurasthenic" woman, as she is sometimes referred to, in the first section of part 2, "A Game of
Chess." "Under the brush, her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still," as she
implores the faceless narrator to "Speak to me,'' to "Think." Vivien Eliot, who must have been in her husband's mind when he
wrote these lines, was reduced to a single marginal response to those words as they appeared in The Waste Land
manuscript"Wonderful!" There was no more that needed to be said, and a similar enthusiastic exclamation might be made to the
woman in the pub (in the second half of "A Game of Chess"), as she runs on about what she told Lil about how to treat her
husband Albert who has been in the army and wants a good time: "And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said. / Oh
is there, she said. Something o' that, I said." Neither of these women should be understood as representing or embodying some
large important symbolic valuesome truth about modem civilization. For if we insist on making the characters representative of
something "more," something deeper, we run the risk of missing out on surface intensities, memorable accents and
associationswhat Lil's friend and critic, referring to the hot gammon Lil and Albert served her, calls "the beauty of it hot."
Shakespeare comes to mind again and the critical habit of treating his plays (particularly the last ones) as symbolic utterances,
large spiritual meanings about ultimate things. Yet the surface of these plays is so much more active, complex, and just plain
interesting than what supposedly lies behind it, that to translate language and events into other terms is simply to dilute and
enfeeble them.
Blackmur's name for what Eliot gave us in The Waste Land was "sensual metaphysics." in a provocative comment from his
Library of Congress lectures (Anni Mirabiles, 19211925) he confronted the surreal nightmare passage in part 5, "What the
Thunder Said," in which "a woman drew her long black hair out tight," in which the towers turn upside down and the bats crawl
downward "down a blackened wall," and voices sing "out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells":
The exegetes tell us, and it is true, that we are in Chapel Perilous and the Perilous Cemetery is no doubt near at hand, and
it may be as one of the exegetes
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says that we hear something like the voice of John the Baptist in the last line. But for myself, I muse and merge and ache
and find myself feeling with the very senses of my thought greetings and cries from all the senses that are.
Testimony such as this risks being no more than a fancier version of the professor in the classroom assuring his students of how
deeply he is moved by a passage. But we can risk it, in the interests of opening up rather than shutting down the poem.
The most challenging of recent reconsiderations of The Waste Land is to be found in Christopher Ricks's T. S. Eliot and
Prejudice, which doesn't address the poem as a whole but selects the openings of part 1 and part 5 with a view to demonstrating
how Eliot's poetry is a principled refusal to strike and maintain clear, dramatic posturesthe unmistakable postures of sentence
sounds that Robert Frost said poetry should provide. As Ricks shows, in patient detail, Eliot's openings"April is the cruelest
month" and "After the torchlight red on sweaty faces"are memorable ones, but the sequences these lines initiate are anything but
clearly marked: ''The force of this opening [he is speaking of the "April" one] is in its combination of unmistakable directness
with all these lurking possibilities of mistaking its direction." For all their differences of vocabulary and emphasis both Blackmur
and Ricks prefer to respond to the volatile surface intensities of language rather than the stable meanings some critics have
presumed to lie underneath them. My own experience in teaching the poem is that if you read it aloud and ask what people hear
in itanywhere in the five partsthe variety of responses, most of them cogent and relevant, will prove The Waste Land to be a
work eminently hospitable to divergent ways of reading it, and full ofin Ricks's phrase"lurking possibilities of mistaking its
direction." These qualities make the poem still vibrant after seven decades of interpretation; my procedure here has been,
accordingly, not to offer another one but to consider the question of and the necessity for "interpretation."
On the other hand, if it is trueas Henry James insisted it was in "The Art of Fiction"that "art lives upon discussion, upon
experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints," then Four
Quartets may be the least vibrant poem in Eliot's oeuvre, justifying Cynthia Ozick's statement that the latest generation "never"
reads it. Even with the publication in 1978 of
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Helen Gardner's fine study of the poem's composition, the relative absence of exchange of views, of lively argument about the
poem's status, has persisted. Commentators are agreed, for the most part, that the Quartets are a mixture of very private and
very public poetry, and that as a result its texture is extremely uneven. The question is whether such unevenness is a fault in the
poem or the source of its power and beauty.
Donald Davie's way of distinguishing, broadly, the two kinds of characteristic poetry in the Quartets is to call one "the sonorous
opulence of Mallarmé," the other a "prosaicism so homespun as to be, from time to time, positively 'prosey' or 'prosing.'" And he
adds that Eliot's famous remark about how "the poetry does not matter" is directed at the second, prosaic pole. But the statement
about poetry not mattering occurs in the second section of "East Coker," part 2, after the Mallarméan opalescence of ''What is
the late November doing / With the disturbance of the spring." That lyric having concluded itself, there is a blank space after
which a voice intones:
That was a way of putting itnot very satisfactory;
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion.
And we are told that "one" is still left with the "intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings," also that "the poetry does not
matter." It is an extravagant thing for a poet who has spent his life wrestling with words and meanings to say, and it surely has
just as much referenceperhaps moreto the "poetical" Mallarmé-like passages in the poem as to the prosaic ones it might be seen
as rationalizing or justifying. At the same time the claim about poetry not mattering shouldn't be taken too solemnly, as
commentators sometimes do when they compare Eliot's work to the late Beethoven quartets, which also, it is said, try to get
"beyond" music (as Eliot would get beyond poetry). In fact the differences between listening to Beethoven and reading Eliot are
a lot more apparent and significant than the similarities. Let us say rather that they may be compared only to the extent that,
despite the innovative, unconventional gestures these artists make in tonality and rhetoric, each remains intractably committed to
his mediumBeethoven to music, Eliot to words.
Ten years after he completed "Little Gidding" Eliot published "The Three Voices of Poetry," an essay that contains a number of
interesting formulations about the creative act, the most relevant to our purposes
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being one he uses to distinguish two of these voicesthe first and most important of which is that of the poet when he is primarily
not attempting "to communicate with anything at all." Eliot draws on Gottfried Benn's lecture "Probleme der Lyrik," but prefers
to use the term ''meditative verse" rather than "lyric" for this first voice. It (the first voice) originates from something
germinating in the poet for which he must find words; it is nothing so definite as an idea, not even an emotionit is what Eliot
calls an "obscure impulse," and he says the following about the poet's relation to that impulse;
He does not know what he has to say until he has said it, and in the effort to say it he is not concerned with making other
people understand anything. He is not concerned, at this stage, with other people at all: only with finding the right words
or, anyhow the least wrong words. . . . He is going to all that trouble, not in order to communicate with anyone, but to
gain relief from acute discomfort.
The Waste Land, we remember, was in Eliot's term just a piece of rhythmical grumbling in which various obscure impulses
causing active discomfort (a nervous collapse, say) eventually found their way into an order of rightor at least the least
wrongwords.
It may be objected that Four Quartets is not The Waste Land and that its impulse is less an impulse than an idea expressed by
Eliot in a number of ways over the postwasteland years: that we lived in a society worm-eaten with liberalism, that the modern
world was no longer capable of entertaining the "higher dream," as Dante had, that "the world is trying the experiment of
attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentalityan experiment which will fail but only after which failure can the
world be saved from suicide." In other words, Four Quartets seems to have issued from an Eliot, or a part of him, very much
concerned with making other people understand that something terribly wrong had happened to the world, and that the poet's
task was to warn them of what had happened and to inspire them with the possibilities of another kind of happening.
My contention is that if Four Quartets were such a poem, concerned with giving poetic expression to the sentiments Eliot had
been expressingsometimes harshly, even intemperatelyin his prose, it would be much less of a poem than it is. His own
distinction still holds: that prose may legitimately concern itself with ideals, while poetry can only deal with actuality. Eliot's
sense of "actuality" was subtler and
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more complex than his social polemics could suggest. What is most moving about the Quartets is the way they try to talk sense
about ideas and ideals, addressing us in the second voice (the poet "talking to other people"), entertaining a formulation,
apologizing for it ("That was a way of putting it, not very satisfactory"), faltering and losing confidence in the usefulness of
what they are trying to do; then pausing perhaps and, gathering impetus, beginning again but in a different key, moving out
somewhere beyond us, no longer occupied with our needs and interests since they have something more intimate and private in
sight. For adequate demonstration of such movement one needs to read aloud an extended passage; here I simply draw attention
to the fifth section of "East Coker," which begins, wearily, with a confession to us that twenty years have been largely wasted
("the years of L'entre deux guerres'') and the struggle to use words brings inevitable failure, that each "raid on the inarticulate"
is also a deterioration, that the burden of the past is immense and overwhelming, that "conditions" (wartime England in 1940)
seem "unpropitious" for any attempt at recovery. But (grimly) "for us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
Then, after a space, the voice resumes, still addressing us, evidently, but with rather more "poetic" inclinations, speaking
intensely about a "lifetime burning in every moment" or "old stones that cannot be deciphered," and of the respective
"times"under starlight, under lamplightin which we spend our evenings. After mention of the second evening comes a
parenthetical phrase ("The evening with the photograph album"), signaling to my ears the moment when the second voice turns
into something else (you cannot speak a parenthesis to an audience) and the lines no longer are organized by an order of
punctuation:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
Then a glimpsed "union" changing into "communion," as through the cry of wave and wind, through "the vast waters / Of the
petrel and the porpoise," the poetry explores, in associative monologue, its subjectthe subject of the four poems taken
togethercontinuously winding and unwinding itself. F. R. Leavis once named that subject, with special reference to the
beginning of "Burnt Norton," "a radical inquiry
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into the nature and methods of his exploration." Let us say rather, "of exploration," by way of noting the poem's reach beyond
the merely personal. And what it explores is not merely the conditions of spiritual and religious possibilities but other matters of
intimate and ultimate concern as well, which presented themselves to a man and poet very much in the "middle way" (Eliot was
fifty-five when he published "Little Gidding"). The poem was an attempt to ascertain what things mattered and how much they
mattered: questions of present, past, and future time, the writing of poetry, the love of worldly and unworldly things, stillness
and speech, one's origins, one's ancestors, one's childhood, the meaning of history, of servitude, of freedom, the circumstances
of a nation at war. What it has to "say" about these matters is not to be extracted from its poetry, which turns out to matter very
much. When a saying is extracted and contemplated in its ''translated" form the result is unmemorable, but within the poem,
from time to time, memorable things happen. In the language of the "dead master" in "Little Gidding" who comes to admonish
the "I" about the gifts of old age:
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
In the spring of 1933, during a nine-month stay in the United States (he had determined to separate permanently from his wife),
Eliot visited the University of Virginia to deliver some lectures later published as After Strange Gods. In their reflections on
orthodoxy (the subtitle was "A Primer of Modern Heresy") the lectures figure as Eliot's most controversial prose utterances. But
early in the first lecture there is an extraordinary passage in which he describes his impressions of the New World on arriving
from England the previous fall:
My local feelings were starred very sadly by my first view of New England, on arriving from Montreal, and journeying all
one day through the beautiful desolate country of Vermont. Those hills had once, I suppose, been covered with primaeval
forest; the forest was razed to make sheep pastures for the English settlers; now the sheep are gone, and most of the
descendants of the settlers; and a new forest appeared blazing with the melancholy glory of October maple and beech and
birch scattered among the evergreens; and after the processions of scarlet and gold and purple wilderness you descend to
the sordor of the half-dead mill towns of southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
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He goes on to say that the "happiest" lands are those in which the long struggle between man and the environment had brought
about a successful accommodation between landscape and "numerous generations of one race," and he concluded that ''those
New England mountains seemed to me to give evidence of a human success so meagre and transitory as to be more desperate
than the desert." He would go on to speak to his Virginia audience about the importance of tradition, and in the preface to the
published volume would characterize their university as "one of the older, smaller and most gracious of American educational
institutions, one of those in which some vestiges of a traditional education seem to survive."
I need not dwell upon what certainly appears to be a bit of wishful thinking, if not just outright flattery, on Eliot's part, nor will I
further consider the context of the previously referred to remark about how free-thinking Jews are undesirable in a traditional
society. When called to the bar of judgment Eliot will probably be willing to negotiate with and revise his terms; at any rate he
never reprinted the lectures. But non-negotiable, as I hear it, is the description of his stirred local feelings as he ventured through
New England, observing and being saddened by the transitoriness of human success. It is the most authentic of Eliotic notes,
andfor all the differences between early and late workis there in the poems from the beginning of "Preludes," with its withered
leaves and lonely cab horses, right down to the end of "Little Gidding," with its children in the apple-tree, "Quick, now, here,
now, always." Three decades ago, in "Fifty Years of American Poetry," Randall Jarrell surveyed our poets from the first half of
this century. When he came to Eliot, Jarrell decided it was appropriate to speak, not from his own voice in the present, but from
the point of view he imagined the future would take about this writer:
Won't the future say to us in helpless astonishment: "But did you actually believe that all these things about objective
correlatives, classicism, the tradition, applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he was one of the most
subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions,
obsessions? . . . But for you, of course, after the first few years, his poetry existed undersea, thousands of feet below that
deluge of exegesis, explication, source listing, scholarship, and criticism that overwhelmed it. And yet how bravely and
personally it survived, its eyes neither coral nor mother-of-pearl but plainly human, full of human anguish!
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The voice of that future has not yet been heard; we should keep listening for it.
William H. Pritchard
Further Reading
Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems: 19091962. New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1963.
Selected Essays: 19171932. New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1932.
Kenner, Hugh. T. S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet. New York: McDowell-Obolensky, 1959.
Kermode, Frank, ed. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Harcourt-Brace, 1975.
Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1978.
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Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop
"As far as I know," Elizabeth Bishop wrote in "As We Like It," her 1948 essay on the older American poet who was by then her
close friend and correspondent, "Miss Moore is The World's Greatest Living Observer." Much literary criticism and classroom
instruction since has linked these two women poets as great observers and describers of nature and natural creatures. This
chapter, which might better bear the paradoxical title, ''Decoupling Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop," will chafe against
the task of treating them together once again. It will resist easy linkage and will attempt to bring into relief some of the sharp
distinctions between Moore's and Bishop's separate poetic accomplishments.
There are, of course, useful comparisons to be made as well as anecdotes about the two friends to tell, but to consider Moore
and Bishop always together as some special subspecies of female American poet is, after all, to persist in a kind of
marginalization. It is to overlook their individual poetic personalities and their other important literary affiliations (or what
Moore called "consanguinities") as well as their respective influences on younger American poets. Moore's and Bishop's
differencesin such crucial matters as descriptive or nature writing, literary influence, religious or meditative sensibility, relation
to the visual arts, and attitude toward sexuality as poetic subject and poetic strategyhinge upon the question that Marianne
Moore's 1924 landmark book, Observations, poses: the question of what and how to observe.
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Before the twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Bishop met the then forty-seven-year-old Marianne Moore outside the reading room
of the New York Public Library on a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1934, she had poured over many of Moore's magazine
publications and had gone to some trouble to locate and read Observations. It was Moore's most important single volume to date
(her Selected Poems would appear just a year later in 1935). The selection and arrangement of that remarkable, out-of-print
book are not preserved in the misleadingly entitled Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1981). Here is part of the first poem in
the edition that the young Bishop opened, entitled "To an Intra-Mural Rat," about one man who reminded her of those
Once met, to be forgot again
Or merely resurrected
In a parenthesis of wit
That found them hastening through it
Too brisk to be inspected.
This rhymed and syllabically arranged epigram, one of Moore's slighter works, still arrests attention with its syntactical high
gloss. Its tartness still surprises. Although the archly elegant grammar is somewhat difficult to followand it is part of Moore's
satiric strategy here to create a realm of supraconversational refinement that establishes the regal speaker's superiority over her
subjectthe tone is plain enough. We are overhearing the poet clearly, if politely, in a voice that may remind us of Moore's Bryn
Mawr (biology major's) education, calling some man a rat.
As he is an "intra-mural rat," he must take part in some competitive activity within the bounds of a school or institution. Since
the author (who had enthusiastically climbed a lamppost at a suffragette demonstration) is an ambitious writer near the
beginning of her career, we may imagine that the offending rat-man belongs to some literary equivalent of an "old-boy's club."
Ironically, the self-important male lacks individuality; he is like "many men" and confined within the woman writer's mere
''parenthesis of wit." The words "hastening" and "brisk" evoke the rapid movement of similar vermin as well as self-reflexively
pointing up the swiftness of the single sentence that records the poet's peremptory response. "To An Intra-Mural Rat" implies,
then, that the subject scrambles about with a mindless ambition, not taking the time to look
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into his own soul, to inspect himself. It suggests also that the speaker could inspect her subject if she so wishedif she found him
worth prolonged attention.
It is impossible for us to open Observationsor for the youthful Elizabeth Bishop to have done sowithout confronting a highly
individual writer whose barbed wit and capacity for cool, laboratory-like appraisal command respect, and who is intent upon
inserting herself into an early Modernist male-dominated dialogue. This initial impression is reinforced by subsequent poems in
the book, which address themselves to explicitly or implicitly male personages, to some praised or satirized "you" (e.g., "To a
Prize Bird," "To a Strategist," ''To Military Progress," "To a Steam Roller"). To Elizabeth Bishop, an aspiring writer about to
graduate from Vassar, the boldness of this older woman writer's dialogic self-assertion as well as her descriptive virtuosity and
undeniable formal accomplishment must have been exhilarating. In her memoir of Marianne Moore, "Efforts of Affection"
(composed in the early 1970s and first published posthumously in Vanity Fair in 1983), Bishop remembers Moore's book as an
"eye-opener."
We can in retrospect see Marianne Moore's Observations as of comparable moment in the history of Modernist publication as T.
S. Eliot's 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations, Wallace Stevens's 1923 Harmonium, or William Carlos Williams's 1923
Spring and All. It marked the then thirty-seven-year-old Moore's real American literary debutthe earlier 1921 Poems, a mere
twenty-four pages, having been arranged and published in England at the Egoist Press by her friends H.D. and Bryher. In the
nearly one hundred pages of her 1924 collection Moore implicitly asks and answers the question, What physical and moral
subjects shall I inspect? What, precisely, is worth my prolonged and painstaking scrutiny?
The book that begins, as we have seen, with the brisk dismissal of one subjecta smug, conformist malegradually reveals the
answer to the question of preferred subject matter in poems that Elizabeth Bishop singled out for mention in her memoir.
Poems like "An Octopus," about a glacier, or "Peter," about a cat, or "Marriage," about marriage, struck me, as they still
do, as miracles of language and construction. Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way
before?
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All three works noted by Bishop are from the second half of Observations, and far from the miniature of "To An Intra-Mural
Rat," "An Octopus," and "Marriage" are Moore's most extended and ambitious poems. Although two of the three works cited
describe in loving detail natural phenomena (a glacier, a cat), they are also, as Bishop certainly recognized, about much more.
What else are Moore's fastidious "nature'' poems concerned with, and why do they appear in a book that also anatomizes the
social institution of marriage? To answer these questions is to close in on the striking differences between Marianne Moore's
and Elizabeth Bishop's approaches to descriptive or nature writing.
The Norton-anthologized "Peter," briefest and most accessible of the three poems mentioned, is about the cat "Peter" himself,
the fiercely individualistic poet herself (the cat, then, who caught the "intramural rat"), and about the undeniable appeal of all
formshowever discommoding their outcome, let the chips fall where they mayof honest and exuberant self-expression,
It is clear that he can see the virtue of naturalness,
that he does not regard the published fact as a surrender.
.............................................
an animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them.
The eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident.
To leap, to lengthen out, divide the air, to purloin, to pursue.
To tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way
in your perturbationthis is life;
to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.
A key, and very unBishop-like, term in this buoyant defense of uninhibited individualism is "virtue." Whatever her ostensible
subject, Marianne Moore is always delineating virtues and vices. Her poemsor "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" (see
Moore's "Poetry")resemble the productions of eighteenth-century satirists as well as Robert Herrick's seventeenth-century poetic
garden Hesperides in that they are loci for both praise and blame. As the word "surrender" in the passage above alerts us,
Marianne Moore's stance is combative: she consistently views her life, particularly her life in literature, as a war zone. In
traditional Christian termsand Marianne Moore was the sister of one Presbyterian minister and the granddaughter of anotherthat
struggle is defined as spiritual, taking place within the indi-
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vidual soul. This Christian viewpoint is upheld in Moore's World War II poem "In Distrust of Merits," where she writes, "There
never was a war that was / not inward"; many of Moore's descriptive poems proffer emblems of such hard-won Christian virtues
as humility, hope, and fortitude. But Moore's combativeness is social as well as spiritual, outward as well as inward. She is (to
call up yet another literary precursor) like Spenser's maiden-warrior Britomart in her fierce opposition to human vices in general,
and to male obtuseness, vanity, and brutality in particular.
Here are some relevant, and irreverent, lines from the two additional poems that Bishop singled out in "Efforts of Affection."
From "Marriage," on the figure of the husband:
There is in him a state of mind
by force of which,
perceiving what it was not
intended that he should,
"he experiences a solemn joy
in seeing that he has become an idol."
And from "An Octopus," describing the glacier-topped, perilous, and yet life-supporting Mount Rainier:
Inimical to "bristling, puny, sweating men
equipped with saws and axes,"
this treacherous glass mountain
admires gentians, ladyslippers, harebells
In these isolated passages from two poems that actually began (during Moore's note-taking stage) as one poem, the writer
bristles back at "bristling" prideful males. She registers her indignation by means, it is worth noting, of quotation from two male
authorsAnatole France and Clifton Johnson, respectivelyas Moore tells us in the footnotes she assiduously supplies. Of course,
the two capacious poems are more wide-ranging in their subject matter and, on the whole, more balanced in their outlook than
these excerpts make them appear. Certainly the female figure in "Marriage," who "loves herself so much, she cannot see herself
enough,'' is not, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion. Nevertheless, Moore's satiric impulse and feminist determination permeate
Observations, as when this part-Irish redhead replies to what she says "men say" in "Sojourn in the Whale," a poem that is on
the surface
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about the enduring "feminine temperament" of beleaguered Ireland but is au fond about Marianne Moore herself:
"Compelled by experience, she
will turn back; water seeks its own level": and you
have smiled. "Water in motion is far
from level." You have seen it when obstacles happened to bar
the pathrise automatically.
The young woman who composed these lines, who incorporated the acidic remarks cited previously in her two longest poems,
and who placed "To an Intra-Mural Rat" at the beginning of her career-estabfishing collection did not mind if she occasionally
affronted. She had, as we know, a ready answer for critics who might object to her as too caustic or even "catty": "As for the
disposition invariably to affront, / an animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them."
The energy that propels Moore's poetic project is, I have been suggesting, at once ethical and retributive. We probably will never
know, although it is a fascinating question, just how much this career-driving energy derived from and was sustained by Moore's
religious, omnipresent, and critically voluble mother. Mary Warner Moore raised her two children alone after John Milton
Moore was institutionalized following a mental breakdown before Marianne was born. Moore lived with her mother
continuously until Mrs. Moore died in 1947, when Marianne was sixty. Casting about for some useful and absorbing project
after her mother's death, Moore committed herself to translatingas it turned out, not very successfullythe Fables of La Fontaine.
In her old age she became an increasingly popular public figure in her famous tricorne hat and cape, a sort of declawed and
adorable poetic mascot (even appearing on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show). Although she went on writing until her death in
1972, practically all of Moore's best work was completed before 1947, written while she enjoyed the company, the refined and
by all accounts nearly Johnsonian conversation, and the peculiarly moral brand of criticism of her devout single parent.
Of course, Moore's descriptive poemswhatever their ethical or retributive functiondo demonstrate her affectionate respect for the
natural world as well as her passion for accurately presenting that world's most minute details. This respect and this passion we
see everywhere in
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lines that compare creatures or objects to other natural creatures or objects, offering up a rich and strange display of nonhuman
"otherness": "his prune shaped head and alligator eyes" ("Peter"); "This elephant skin / which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell
of the cocoanut" ("Black Earth''); "Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps / adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting
itself like / an / injured fan" ("The Fish").
But Marianne Moore, so much more than an entertaining and eccentric menagerist, is a weightier writer than many have
acknowledged. As Bishop put it early on, in her 1948 essay on Moore's poetry, "Although the tone is frequently light or ironic
the total effect is of such ritualistic solemnity that I feel in reading her one should constantly bear in mind the secondary and
frequently sombre meaning of the title of her first book: Observations."
Moore's title does invite association with religious rites or observances. At the same time, it cannily calls to mind laboratory
dissection and inspectionthus holding out the promise of poetic contents scientific, dispassionate, and resolutely Modern. The
title may also have been chosen to suggest Yankee self-reliance and a spirit of democracy: any literate American can jot down a
few observations, or a few arresting quotations, Moore appears to say. In fact, this baseball-aficionado, a loyal fan of the
Brooklyn Dodgers, repeatedly promoted the notion that what she did was nothing effete or so very out of reach. (About poetry
Moore famously remarked in the poem of that tide, "I, too, dislike it"; she referred to her longest poem, "Marriage," as just "a
little anthology of statements that took my fancy"; and she expressed her preference [in "England"] for "plain American which
cats and dogs can read!") Finally, the richly connotative word "observations" recalls Moore's satiric remarks and sketchesher
talent, often at aristocratic odds with her democratic allegiances, for skillful social dissection.
"Mother; manners; morals," Elizabeth Bishop muses in her "Efforts of Affection," freely associating on Marianne Moore's
double initial: "manners as morals? Or is it morals as manners?" At a time of life when she was reaping the rewards of her own
creative labors, the mature Bishop fondly (and just a touch superciliously) reflects back on her relation with her poetic "mother."
In specific Bishop may here be recalling instances of the older writer's prudishnessas when in October of 1940 Moore had
objected to Bishop's use of the term "water-closet" in the poem "Roosters." But Bishop is also, with her Alice-in-Wonder-
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land-like wordplay on "manners" and "morals," pointing to a more general and important aesthetic difference.
If Marianne Moore's poetic personality may be described as ethical, combative, and retributive, then behind Elizabeth Bishop's
body of work we sense a more vulnerable spirit, at once elegiac and yearning. This, I think, at least partly accounts for Moore's
enduring and mutually supportive relationship with Ezra Pound (since Pound, however disastrously misguided at times, was
always ethically driven), and it suggests an additional reason for Bishop's closeness to Robert Lowell, an elegiac writer if there
ever was one. The same distinction in poetic voice or personality may also be why criticsparticularly male criticshave tended to
write about Moore with mixed awe and irritation, while Bishop seems consistently to have elicited a tone of protective affection.
T. S. Eliot, for instance, praised Moore sincerely but somewhat oddly, saying that she was "too good to be appreciated
anywhere," while a more recent male critic has referred to Moore's "fortresslike" nature. A popular adjective for Bishop, in
contrast, has been "poignant''; the same critic (Robert Pinsky) who used the word "fortresslike" for Moore has in Bishop's case
adopted more easygoing and affectionate adjectives: "amusing," "genial," and "sad." It is not that these terms, often shrewdly
deployed in their critical contexts, are wrongbut that they interestingly suggest familial parallels. The two very different critical
tonalities that Moore and Bishop have elicited would seem to register something like response to a formidable and judgmental
mother versus response to a talented but emotionally frail sister. When, for example, Robert Lowell compared Bishop's poetry to
Moore's, he found the younger woman's writing "softer, dreamier, more human, and more personal."
Of Lowell's comparative adjectives, I find "dreamier" the most telling. Elizabeth Bishop's father died when she was an infant;
and her mother, having suffered a series of mental breakdowns, was permanently institutionalized by the time Elizabeth was
five. Bishop's poetry, unsurprisingly, is full of longings and losses. It yearns for some (always finally unattainable) resting place,
even as it aches nostalgically for the stable childhood home that in her case never really existed. Many poems take on the
quality of daydreams. Some actually purport to record dreams (e.g., "The Weed," "The Unbeliever," "Crusoe in England"). And
variations on the word "dream" show up no fewer than thirty-seven times in The Complete Poems. It is no wonder that in the
1930s
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the young Bishop was enamored of French surrealist writing. She seems always to have been fascinated by what occurs in the
liminal state between consciousness and unconsciousness, waking and sleeping. This fascination with nonrational states and
blurred boundaries turns up in "The Moose" and "Five Flights Up" from her final book, Geography III, as well as in much
earlier poems from North & South, such as "Love Lies Sleeping," "Roosters,'' or "Sleeping Standing Up," which begins with
these lines:
As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
through ninety dark degrees;
the bureau lies on the wall
And thoughts that were recumbent in the day
rise as the others fall,
stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees.
This rhymed and mostly iambic stanza, which sounds almost like a lullaby, possesses a grave and childlike quality, a sort of
logical illogic: dreams or late-night thoughts become trees that stand up when the daytime, conscious thoughts / trees fall down.
Bishop's half-humorous, half-ominous physicalizing of the relentlessand, as the verb "stand up" suggests, almost sexually
potentunconscious is the sort of move Marianne Moore had in mind when she said that Bishop had a talent for "exteriorizing of
the interior." On an imaginary chart that would line up poets from "most conscious" to "least conscious," Marianne Moore,
carrying her tiny notebooks with their cross-referenced indexes, would be near the opposite end from Elizabeth Bishop, who
approached the task of poetic composition far less rationally. Bishop preferred (to borrow a phrase from her 1978 elegy for
Robert Lowell, "North Haven") "drifting, in a dreamy sort of way."
For Elizabeth Bishop "drifting," both mentally and physically, was a mode of being. Her descriptive writing records the
observations not of a stay-at-home library researcher (like Marianne Moore) but rather of an inveterate traveler. Perhaps this
difference in preferred creative environment or positioning has to do with the creatrix behind the scenes in each case. (As
Bishop put it in her indirectly autobiographical poem, "Crusoe in England": "Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?")
Where the mother was, there we find the daughter. In Moore's case that would be always the same apartment, with its precisely
placed clutter of interesting objets and its carefully lemon-oiled furniture. In Bish-
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op's case, that location would be nowhere at allsince her institutionalized mother was never with her, never present. And so the
daughter of the absent mother is always on the move, sending postcards and exotic gifts (rattlesnake fangs, a paper nautilus, a
pickled coral snake, Cuban tree snails) to her mentor or poetic "mother" back in Brooklyn.
The poems themselves take place on the move. The speaker of Bishop's most anthologized poem, "The Fish" (North & South),
is literally drifting at sea in her "little rented boat" when she (the speaker is indistinguishable from the poet herself) hooks a
"battered and venerable / and homely" fish:
. . . Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
In "The Moose," one of the great poems from Bishop's last book, details of passing scenery are faithfully recorded by a bus
passenger (again, we assume, Bishop herself) on her way to Boston from Nova Scotia as she witnesses the "shifting, salty, thin"
fog that "comes closing in."
Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hen's feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles
The description in both cases shows a Moore-like respect for nonhuman "otherness" in all of its particularity. But this poet
demonstrates little interest in moral abstraction (the possibility, capitalized upon by Marianne Moore, for linking physical details
to Christian virtues such as humility or fortitude). Solitary and somewhat melancholy, Bishop instead is grateful for some
passing visual distraction.
Marianne Moore possesses a scientist's interest in natural phenomena as well as a moralist's appreciation for nature as
emblematic opportunity. But for Elizabeth Bishop nature takes on a more dramatic and psychological character: it is for her a
presence that leads not only (as it
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always must for the projective human mind) back to personal preoccupations but also refreshingly away from the tangle of her
own too-familiar thoughts. In the above-cited passage from "The Moose" the fog may be said to evoke or "exteriorize" the bus
traveler's internal, dreamlike state (and the poem moves suggestively from fog and twilight to darkness). But the fog is, as
important, just an interesting phenomenon of the coastal weather outside the bus. The fog-covered "lupins like apostles" may
nostalgically recall Bishop's churchgoing early childhood in Nova Scotiayet they remain, as the modest simile reminds us, real
flowers, independent of personal associations. The writing here, in other words, moves back and forth from outside to inside, in
Bishop's characteristic "dreamy sort of way." The seemingly haphazard rhyming (''thin" / "in"; "crystals" / "apostles") helps to
conjure up an atmosphere in which past and present, exterior and interior intermingle, unexpectedly chiming with or echoing one
another. When the poem concludes, after a female moose on the highway has momentarily halted the bus, it is as if the traveler
has glimpsed something inside as well as outside herself: a temporary answer to her craving for a home and mother in this
female creature that is "homely as a house." The moose also comes as a reassuring reminderarriving mysteriously, from the
darknessof a natural world outside that is free of the heavy weight of human history.
Like so many of Bishop's "questions of travel" (to borrow the evocative title of her third book of poetry), "The Moose" is a
poem of questioning and quest. Here, as elsewhere, the poet-questor drifts toward some psychological as well as geographical
destinationonly to meet with another question, or questions: "Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?"
("The Moose"); "But how could Arthur go, / clutching his tiny lily, / with his eyes shut up so fight / and the roads deep in
snow?" ("First Death in Nova Scotia"); "Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?" ("Questions of Travel").
Even when the poems do not end in the interrogative they resist definitive answers or conclusions. For example, one of Bishop's
most stately and ambitious productions, "At the Fishhouses," ends inconclusively with the observation that "our knowledge is
historical, flowing, and flown." Hers remains a world of self-forgetful, exquisite attentiveness to natural detail in the midst of
deep uncertainty and spiritual restlessness.
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A fascination with dreams or dream imagery, a spiritually questing nature, and a marked preference for the interrogative mode.
These general qualities I have been pointing to in Elizabeth Bishop's writing we find also in her most important literary
precursor, the seventeenth-century Anglican minister and metaphysical poet, George Herbert.
Marianne Moore, too, as we will see, struck source-gold in the rich mine of the English Renaissance. This is another link
between the two modern women poetsbut one that calls also for decoupling. Moore and Bishop were attracted to very different
literary models for reasons that may be explained partly by their own remarkably divergent family experiences. In their separate
procedures of Modernist self-fashioning, Moore and Bishop put their respective Renaissance models to very different use.
When she was fourteen Bishop found a volume of Herbert (whom she had never read) in a secondhand bookshop in
Provincetown. Many years later, in a talk she gave on "Influences" for the Academy of American Poets, she recounted the event:
"I read some of his things there in the bookshop and liked them so much I bought the book. . . . Herbert has always been one of
my favorite poets, if not my favorite."
Throughout her life, George Herbert remained for Bishop an almost palpable presence. She recorded, in her early twenties, a
marvelous dream in which he appeared in "a beautiful dark red satin coat" (like a bishop?) and promised to be "useful" to her.
Bishop habitually brought along her copy of Herbert when she traveled, and was particularly pleased and grateful when she
received the gift of Robert (Cal) Lowell's family edition of Herbert. When Calwho, like herself, had a drinking problemwas
going through an especially difficult time in the late 1950s she wrote to him from Brazil, recommending George Herbert's
translation of an Italian "Treatise on Temperance & Sobriety." Herbert, then, seems to have been for Bishop at once a literary
and psychological resource: a wellspring, over the years, of poetic techniques and topics ("The Weed'' in her first book is a selfavowed "imitation" of Herbert's almost surrealistic dream-allegory, "Love Unknown") as well as a kind of friend whom she
included in other friendships and to whom she was in the habit of turning for comfort.
From earliest childhood, when she went to both Presbyterian and Baptist churches in the small Nova Scotian town of Great
Village with her maternal grandparents, Bishop was a lover of Protestant hymns. In
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her short, often roughly three-beat lines we see the influence of hymn meter as well as of Herbert's hymnlike verses, with their
mixed meters and short lines. Herbert's poems reassured, with what Bishop called "homely images and their solidity." They
appealed to her combined religious and domestic yearnings and were associated in her mind with childlike wonder and
innocence. Bishop said that she was particularly attracted to Herbert's simple demeanor and "naturalness of tone," and she
adopted for her own purposes his childlike persona and predilection for Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Here, for example, is
George Herbert's humorous parody of himself in a melancholy mood: "I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree" (''Affliction I").
And here is Bishop in the persona of Robinson Crusoe, in a similarly self-pitying and self-mocking frame of mind: "The sun set
in the sea; the same odd sun / rose from the sea, / and there was one of it and one of me" ("Crusoe in England").
If the tone and monosyllabic tendencies of each poet are often alike, the contexts out of which Herbert and Bishop write differ,
of course, dramatically. The seventeenth-century pastor of Bemerton presents himself in his poems as the sometimes querulous
"Child" of a "Lord" against whose absolute power he is wont to chafe (as in "The Collar"). But no matter how often the child in
Herbert's world complains or rebels, he can never be absented from his omniscient, omnipresent, and loving lord. Herbert's
troubled speaker comes to realize over and over throughout The Temple that he is always, already, at home. While Bishop, like
Herbert, seeks a home, she never finds one. If she, too, writes a poetry of spiritual struggle, in her skeptical and secular
worldunlike Herbert's orthodox Christian onethat struggle has no resolution beyond the provisional constructs of her art.
Marianne Moore, as I have said, was not like Elizabeth Bishop an "unbeliever" (see Bishop's poem "The Unbeliever")and Moore
had her own deep and religiously engaged interests in seventeenth-century literature. Born into a devout Presbyterian family,
Moore attended church throughout her life and conferred about ideas for sermons with her minister brother, John Warner. Her
spiritual sensibility, like Bishop's (like everyone's), was closely related to her family experience. In Moore's case, we have a
close-knit, single-parent household bonded in Christian practicewhile in Bishop's case we find a near-orphan's skeptical and
nostalgic relation to Christianity. If Bishop's personal constellation of religious associations met an answeringand "use-
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ful"echo in the poetry of George Herbert, Marianne Moore would be enabled by a strikingly different literary-cum-spiritual
model.
While at Bryn Mawr (19051909) Moore took a year-long course in seventeenth-century English prose, a subject that attracted
her both aesthetically and morally. (The note "relig," in tiny handwriting, appears in the margins of her class notes next to
particularly stirring passages.) Of all the Renaissance prose writers she studied Sir Thomas Browne seems to have been closest
to her heart. Moore repeatedly cites him as a kind of ethical and stylistic standard during her years as editor of the Dial in the
1920s, and features of Browne's prose show up strikingly in her poetry.
Browne drew on early Renaissance bestiaries in compiling his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, with its entries "Of Snayles," "Of the
Elephant," "Of the Basilisk," and so forthwhile Moore's literary table of contents includes "To a Snail," ''Elephants," "The
Plumet Basilisk," and so on. Like her literary "father," Moore engages in naturalistic investigation for its own sake as well as in
the expectation that the "Book of Nature" will yield moral instruction. As Browne puts it in his Religio Medici (A Doctor's
Religion):
The wisedome of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about, and with a grosse rusticity
admire his works; those highly magnifie him, whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his
creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admirer.
"Deliberate research": the phrase must have had enormous appeal for this biology major and nascent writerseeking at once to
hold on to the fortifying family religious tradition and to strike out in crisply objective poetic directions, to "modernize" herself.
(And this, we should remember, was Moore's independent project: Pound's famous Imagist credo, "A Few Don'ts," first
appeared in Poetry in 1913, four years after Moore's formative Bryn Mawr period.)
Sir Thomas Browne's stylistic practices as well as his subject matter lent themselves to Moore's paradoxically traditional brand
of Modernism. She adopted his classical allusiveness, dense assonance and consonance, Latinity, and interesting obliquity:
Antiquity held too light thoughts from Objects of mortality, while some drew provocatives of mirth from Anatomies, and
Juglers shewed tricks with Skeletons. (Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial)
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. . . Though Mars is excessive
in being preventive,
heroes need not write an ordinall of attributes to enumerate what they hate.
(Moore, "Armor's Undermining Modesty")
Most telling, I think, is that something very like Browne's brief ethical crystallizations, what we might call his penchant for the
trenchant, resurfaces in Moore's poetics. Compare these separate phrases of Browne's and Moore's:
The heart of man is the place the Devils dwell in
thus is Man that great and true Amphibium
the way to be immortal is to die daily
there is a general beauty in the works of God
(Sir Thomas Browne)
Love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust to
Contractility is a virtue / as modesty is a virtue
The power of the visible / is the invisible
Beauty is everlasting / and dust is for a time
(Marianne Moore)
All these statements use the present tense of the stative verb "to be"; all point not to variable particulars but to permanent and
ethical precepts. (And yet, as Moore said, "Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one's
enjoyment." It is worth noting in passing that both Moore and her seventeenth-century predecessor provide genuinely funny
moments, although these suffer from the surgery of citation. As Moore writes, almost with a sidelong smile, in ''The Pangolin":
"Among animals, one has a sense of humor. / Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.")
We can see, then, that Moore's and Bishop's primary models are tonally and stylistically poles apart. The great baroque prose of
Sir Thomas Browne does not inventory the same range included in the great meditative poetry of George Herbert. But both are,
it should be noted, English Renaissance males. This is of course not anomalous in the saga of American Modernism, which
includes Ezra Pound's call for "a renaissance, or awakening" in letters, as well as T. S. Eliot's 1921 essay praising the
seventeenth-century Metaphysicals. But in this his-
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torical context neither Moore nor Bishop was a slavish imitatoreach having discovered her important precursor independently, at
an early age. Each aligned herself with a non-Eliotic Renaissance model (not Donne, not a Jacobean playwright), each thus
taking her individual place in this widespread twentieth-century revaluation and suggesting to her literary descendants
alternative avenues to explore or ores to mine.
If we look for the late twentieth-century descendants of Marianne Moore we are likely to spot poets who have adopted not so
much the clear-eyed satire and ethical urgency that reside at the heart of Moore's work as the surface decoration, so to speak, of
her poetic "house." Lesser poets have imitated the syllabic meter and fancy stanzaic shapes that mayif divorced from their
original Modernist functioncome to seem like so much Victorian gingerbread. The display of quotation and vocabulary that in
Moore's original managed to subvert "poetic" expectation, in feebler copies can seem fussy, like geegaws in an overfurnished
library. What was Modern reverts, ironically, to quaintness. What was fresh in one context becomes fusty in another.
Moore has more importantly affected American poetry in ways that are, perhaps, more difficult to see. Rightly overlooking
mediocre imitators, Harold Bloom for one claims as Moore's poetic progeny such original and nonservile students of her work
as Richard Wilbur, May Swenson, and Bishop herself. Moore made respectable the allusive-descriptive poem in American
letters. And she must, through the sheer exuberance of her early Modernist example, have emboldened untold other women to
write. It is a pity that she is not read more, both in and out of classrooms and workshops. No one's poetry can teach a young
writer more about how to take up a subjecta place, an institution, a person, animal or objectand then to consider it from a
number of possible physical and moral angles. No one shows us how to ask with more intelligence and more thoroughness,
"Just what is this thing that I am looking at?"
In contrast, given Elizabeth Bishop's popularity among now powerfully ensconced critics and poets as well as her recent
pervasiveness as a workshop model, the self-proclaimed "heirs" of Bishop are now legion. The more gifted of her poetic
childrenand, by this time, grandchildrenhave found ways to adopt for their individual purposes her proclivity for "exteriorizing
of the interior." I am thinking of such diver-
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gent writers as Frank Bidart and Elizabeth Spires. Some of her weaker imitators seem to have decided that a general ambiance
of urbane melancholy, a handful of travel journal exoticisms, and a sort of fey, interrogative tic will suffice. Writerly responses
to Bishop, as to Marianne Moore, range from surface to depthfrom an aesthetic version of yuppie acquisitiveness to genuine
understanding and affection.
In crucial matters, including descriptive or nature writing, literary influences, and religious or meditative sensibility, Moore's and
Bishop's differences, as I have argued, are pronouncedtheir distinctions hinging upon the two poets' individual responses to the
question of what, and how, to observe. Continuing absorption with this issue of observation led each of them to take more than a
passing or dilettante's interest in the visual arts. Each, in fact, repeatedly said she'd like to have been a painterunsurprising,
perhaps, given the richly descriptive nature of their writings. That Moore and Bishop were drawn to very different visual artists,
and that their respective writings resemble different kinds of art works, should also arrive as no surprise.
In 1916 Marianne Moore and her mother moved from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to Chatham, New Jersey, where Marianne's older
brother had accepted a post as minister of the Ogden Memorial Presbyterian Church. This meant that the twenty-nine-year-old
poet could regularly take train trips into Greenwich Village to meet other writers and visit galleries, including the famous
Stieglitz ("291") gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Then, in 1918, with John Warner abroad as a navy chaplain, Mrs. Moore and
Marianne moved to an apartment at St. Luke's Place in the Village. Here they remained until 1929, when they made their final
move, to Brooklyn.
This must have been an extremely exciting time for the young poêt, who met such artists as Charles Demuth and Georgia
O'Keeffe, and, among influential art critics, Paul Rosenfeld and Henry McBride. The latter two became her colleagues at the
Dial, a magazine of the arts that reviewed important exhibitions and printed photographs of works by (among others) Rousseau,
Marin, O'Keeffe, Brancusi, Picasso, de Chirico, Cocteau, and Seurat. We have at the end of this century nothing like the New
York City of the teens and twenties, when the arts were "making it new" in a welter of creative verve and reciprocity. "Over
here," Moore wrote to Ezra Pound in 1919, "it strikes me that there is
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more evidence of power among painters and sculptors than among writers." In those contemporary fine arts Moore, who had
independently "modernized" herself, found a powerful source of aesthetic invigoration and affirmation.
Sometimes Moore's literary practices even resemble well-known strategies of Cubist painters. (She carefully saved, it is worth
noting, several early reviews of Cubist art.) Like Braque or Picasso or Gris, Moore wishes to present her subjects from many
juxtaposed angles. First fragmenting a given subject (a cat called "Peter," for example) into its component parts, she then
rearranges those parts into a new, multiperspectival and more abstract whole. Her found quotations, too: like elements of
collagelike Cubist bits of actual newsprint from Le Jourtheir reassembly on the page calls into question the facile distinction
between museum artifacts and the disposable products of every day. Even Moore's practice of syllabic composition makes for
deliberately disorienting effects, similar to those of Cubist art. It is the verbal rather than the visual line, though, that is broken
unexpectedly. Through dissections of syntax and odd positionings we are forced to think and see freshlyas here, in a passage
describing a scarred cliff, from "The Fish":
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice
all the physical features of
accident . . .
But Moore's engagement with the visual arts exceeds the limits of the Modern. In her poetic gallery we find Egyptian, Roman
and Chinese art, as well as Giotto, da Vinci, and El Greco. Perhaps the most important pre-Modern artist for her was the
German engraver and painter Albrecht Dürer (14711528), whose work she mentions in several poems and in praise of whom she
composed a 1928 "Comment" for the Dial. Evidently, Moore, who herself sketched numerous creatures, some charmingly, often
from museum models or book illustrations (e.g., jerboas, a pterodactyl, a tiger salamander, a baby opossum, a giant anteater),
was taken with the linear exactitudes of Dürer, who also often
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came by his knowledge of exotic landscapes or creatures second hand (e.g., lions or his famous rhinoceros).
Moore was drawn as well to the quiet religious qualities of Dürer's graphics, as she tells us in the Dial in her inimitable fashion:
"There is danger of extravagance in denoting as sacrosanct or devout, an art so robust as to include in it that which is neither,
but Dürer's separately perfect media do somehow suggest the virtues which St. Jerome enumerates as constituting the 'hous of
cryst.'" Like the German artist, Moore sought, in contemplation of concrete particulars, general truths; for her, "the power of the
visible / is the invisible." What Moore celebrates in Dürer is his "capacity for newness inclusive of oldness," a bricolage typical
of her brand of Modernism, so paradoxically traditional and radical.
Elizabeth Bishop, who drew sketches and watercolors of places where she'd lived or visited, valued the arts, not Moore's way,
for their capacity to communicate general and spiritual truths, but rather for their evocation of specific human experiences in
individual locales. Her own art urgently wishes to remember, to collect, to keep: a treasured house, a childhood event, a
romantic love, a natural object or creature, a scenic view. This obsession with keeping may be compared to Wordsworth's poetry
of recollection (especially since Bishop once called herself "a minor female Wordsworth"), but it parallels, too, the visual
obsession of painters, particularly realist artists.
Although Bishop hung abstract paintings as well as photographs and travel mementos on the walls of her various houses and
apartments, what she especially relished was naive realism. During her years in the late 1930s in Florida, for example, she was
drawn to the work of the Cuban folk artist, Gregorio Valdes, whom she commissioned to paint a large picture of the house in
which she was living. Later, when the frail old painter died, she wrote a combined memoir and tribute:
The first painting I saw by Gregorio Valdes was in the window of a barbershop on Duval Street, the main street of Key
West. The shop is in a block of cheap liquor stores, shoeshine parlors and poolrooms, all under a long wooden awning
shading the sidewalk. The picture leaned against a cardboard advertisement for Eagle Whiskey, among other window
decorations of red-and-green crepe-paper rosettes and streamers left over from Christmas and the announcement of an
operetta at the Cuban schoolall covered with dust and fly spots and littered with termites' wings.
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Bishop here honors the painstaking efforts of this folk artist by meticulously "painting" the scene of her first encounter with a
Valdes painting. Valdes's naive presentation in the barbershop was, as Bishop recounts with almost childlike wonder, "a view, a
real View," of a road lined on either side by seven palm trees, with a tiny man on a donkey in the middle of the road, "and far
away on the right the white speck of a thatched Cuban cabin."
This incident in Key West may remind us of Bishop's much earlier discovery of George Herbert in the Provincetown bookshop.
To be sure, Herbert and Valdes practiced different arts in different eras, with dissimilar sophistication, but in Bishop they struck
a common chord. In both cases some deep need associated with childhood and domesticity has been answered.
By asking Valdes to paint a large picture of her house, Bishop in a way is asking him to perform an act of magic. Once
commemorated in paint, perhaps her house will become more than just another temporary, if charming, abode. Perhaps the
picture, being large, will sympathetically make the dream of "home" seem immediate and attainable (unlike, then, the distant
"white speck," or phantom, of the Cuban cabin in that first-seen Valdes painting). It is as though Bishop were asking a fellow
recorder of life's passing surfaces to create for her not just a painting but a Platonic Idea: "A house, a real House" (something
not unlike the "proto-dream-house" in one of her best poems, "The End of March'').
Of course, Bishop knows that the painted replica, like her actual Key West abode, can never be more than an unsatisfactory
mock-up of her dream (just as she realizes, poignantly, that the house in "The End of March" is "perfect! Butimpossible"). And,
to end this little story, here is Bishop's accountrueful, oneiromantic, and playfulof finding Valdes's delivered painting, propped
against a wall on her veranda:
As I came home that evening I saw it there from a long way off down the streeta fair-sized copy of the house, in green
and white, leaning against its green-and-white prototype. In the gray twilight they seemed to blur together and I had the
feeling that if I came closer I would be able to see another miniature copy of the house leaning on the porch of the painted
house, and so onlike the Old Dutch Cleanser advertisements.
In another of her prose pieces, a funny and delightful account of the time she spent working in 1934 as a correspondence-course
instructor
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for the "U.S.A. School of Writing," Bishop contrasts what she calls "'primitive' writing" with primitive painting. She cannot
abide the "slipshodiness and haste" of the former, with its "lack of detail." But Bishop clearly cherishes the primitive painter
who "loves detail and lingers over it and emphasizes it at the expense of the picture as a whole.'' Primitive painting retainsin its
naive way, highlightswhat Bishop sees as the essential element of verbal as well as visual art: patient and faithful rendering of
the bright bits and pieces of life.
It is her valuing of assiduous mimesis that leads Bishop to celebrate even her great-uncle's earnest but undistinguished oil
paintings, in two poems that are self-mockingly but unreformedly obsessed with memory. "Large Bad Picture" (from North &
South) begins with the rather Wordsworthian enjambed pentameter line, "Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or." (Here, I am
recalling Wordsworth's famous opening: "Five years have passed, five summers, with the length.") And "Poem" (from
Geography III) seems to recollect that recollector of emotions in tranquillity with yet another pentameter: "life and the memory
of it so compressed." These two poems we find positioned in Bishop's first and last books, respectively, as if to underscore the
twofold analogy. Her poetry is like primitive painting (if more sophisticated and self-conscious); it is like Wordsworth's poetry
(if less consoling and grandiloquent). For Bishop, there is "One Art," and its muse, or mother, is Memoria.
Mothers as muses? Or is it muses as mothers? The issue of the creatrix behind each poet, a topic that surfaced briefly elsewhere,
will occupy this chapter's final paragraphs. But first I want to make a few summary remarks also under the rubric of gender and
engenderingabout Moore's and Bishop's strikingly different relations to sexuality as poetic subject and poetic strategy.
Marianne Moore remained unmarried and, evidently, sexually chaste. Elizabeth Bishop's most long-lasting relationship was with
her Brazilian companion, Lota de Macedo Soares. Since both poets eschewed or eluded traditional heterosexual relationships, it
has been easy for readers to link them together as impersonal, and generally asexual, descriptive writers. But sex is energy, and
easy conflation of the two poets obscures the peculiarly intense and differently sublimated energy of each.
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Although Moore's satiric jibes in Observations can be seen as obsessed with sexual difference and discordance, her subject
matter is not what most people would call "sexual"which is to say that she does not write romantic-erotic poetry. "Some," said
Marianne Moore, "are not interested in sex pathology.'' Wisely, she does not write about what she has not experienced. The
closest she gets to sexual celebration is in this somewhat precious and uncharacteristically fin-de-siècle passage from
"Marriage":
Below the incandescent stars
below the incandescent fruit,
the strange experience of beauty;
its existence is too much;
it tears one to pieces
Moore's attempted acknowledgment here of the power of sexualityrequisite, after all, in a poem that purports to inventory the
institution of "Marriage"betrays her discomfort. The lines shy away from actual human bodies, referring instead to "stars" and
"fruit." One senses Moore's anxiety and embarrassment as she tries on for this occasion the ill-fitting hand-me-down of the
Romantic poet's "pleasurable pain."
Moorelike many poets, perhaps even mostwrites sexier lines when she is not writing about sex. In her work we find this
essential commodity, paradoxically, in its absencein the tense, erotic charge of the language itself rather than in any steamy
scene the language portrays:
. . . with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
Saying these lines aloudpronouncing the almost too-pretty long e's and feeling the way "etched" comes between two fs and adds
up, in some satisfying way, to "fresh," a near homonym for "fish"you don't have to be told that Moore is a sensual writer. And
yet this is hardly heavy sensuality: a chenin blanc rather than a late harvest riesling. Neither is this a poetry of interpersonal
intimacy, the only intimacy here being that of the poet with her own five unjaded senses and her typewriter. If we want to read
poetry of intersubjective rather than intra-
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subjective passion, we had better look elsewherenot to this astonishing American original who averred that "innate sensuality is
a mildew."
Elizabeth Bishop's great subject, in contradistinction, is intersubjectivity. What engages her is relationship, whether with another
natural creature (e.g., a fish or a moose), a friend, a family member, or a lover. Often these entities are paradoxically absent
presences, but absence or distance in Bishop's poetry only sharpens the yearning for relationship.
And Bishop is undeniably a love poet. That she has not generally been regarded as such is the result of two related facts: her
lesbianism and her practiceso consistent that one might almost call it a policyof poetic indirection. The one must be understood,
at least partly, as defensive response to the other, since Bishop evidently felt, or could at times feel, her sexual dispensation as
the "difference that kills, / or intimidates, much / of all our small shadowy / life" ("Song for the Rainy Season"). There are
specific tropes, in faceinversion, and what I have called thirdness (the trope of the third thing, or tertium quid, outside the
categories of two)that recur obsessively throughout Bishop's oeuvre. These recurrent tropes evokeindirectly, as was her policythe
transformative power along with the pleasure and anxiety she associated with her sexual state.
Marianne Moore understood, if she did not approve, the romantic impulse in Bishop's work. After all, she had sponsored and
agreed to "introduce" two of Bishop's early poems in a 1935 anthology called Trial Balancesone of those two being (in Bishop's
words) a group of "two or three feeble pastiches of late seventeenth-century poetry called "Valentines'':
Love with his gilded bow and crystal arrows
Has slain us all,
Has pierced the English sparrows
Who languish for each other in the dust,
While from their bosoms, puffed with hopeless lust,
The red drops fall.
Moore's accompanying remarks in Trial Balances proffer a withering kindness: "Miss Bishop's sparrows are not revolting,
merely disaffecting." Much later, when Bishop showed Moore her elegant and haunting lyric of unfulfilled desire, "Insomnia,"
Moore (who was a warmhearted supporter of Bishop all her life) called it "a cheap love poem."
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Moore and Bishop, then, are clearly divided over the use of sexual or romantic subject matter. Both poets, though, do use in
their work (even as they sometimes call into question) strategies that have been seen as typically "feminine." A list of these
would include reticence or modesty, a tendency to digression or apparent meandering, and self-forgetful attentiveness to others.
But in each writer's work these general strategies appear for different reasons and to different effect.
Marianne Moore, like all Modernists, was reacting against what Ezra Pound called the "sentimentalistic, mannerish" nineteenth
century. As a woman writer she was also particularly anxious to distinguish herself from nineteenth-century "poetesses," within
whose works (according to all major male Modernists) that century's smarmy sins were writ most large. That Moore could
distance herself from the disreputable emotionality of her immediate female predecessors through the adoption of "feminine"
reticence is, of course, ironic. Ironic, too, is Moore's deployment of the supposedly feminine predisposition for digression. By
making room for multifarious and obliquely related quotations and allusions, she still "masculinizes" and modernizes her
poetryrendering it impersonal, learned, and interestingly ''experimental." As a final twist, by attending in an unegoistic way to
small creatures and objects, Moore revises a typically female role: through self-forgetful attentiveness she arrives at descriptions
every whit as scientific and un"sentimentalistic" as Pound himself could wish.
Bishop's battle is not so much with the pale specters of nineteenth-century "poetesses" as it is with male Romantic poetsand with
herself. She owns a different personal agenda within a different literary-historical context. She is a nature poet who nevertheless
critiques the Romantic poet's appropriation of nature; a feminist who adopts in her most autobiographical poems male personae;
a love poet who conceals as well as reveals her passion. Bishop's use of typically "feminine" writing strategies, unlike Moore's,
would seem to stem at least in part from a divided and uneasy nature. She felt a need for sexual disguise as well as a related
desire to escape at times into the salutary "otherness" of the natural world. Unsurprisingly, then, it is in a translationa service of
attention to another's work, allowing for the greatest reticence of self-expressionthat Bishop perhaps most unabashedly expresses
her own attitude. Here is Elizabeth as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in the last stanza of "Don't Kill Yourself," from the
Portuguese:
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In the meantime you go on your way
vertical, melancholy.
You're the palm tree, you're the cry
nobody heard in the theatre
and all the lights went out.
Love in the dark, no, love
in the daylight, is always sad
That "cry / nobody heard in the theatre" poignantly recalls the beginning of "In the Village," Bishop's autobiographical short
story about her mother's last visit home (to Bishop's grandparents' house) before final institutionalization:
A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight
stain in those pure blue skies. . . . The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memoryin the past, in the present, and those
years between.
To the memory of the mother's demented scream are added other, more reassuring sounds: the bells of cows, chiming softly; the
"beautiful pure" clang of a blacksmiths hammerbright fragments from the surfaces of life. Still, Bishop's despairing repetition of
one verb here, "hangs," reminds us that what she carries with her always is this inaudible screaming, this absent presence, this
frightening but necessarily yearned-for mother. Bishop's inheritance, as her synaesthetic, understated phrasing suggests, has
included a permanent "slight stain'' to blot her happiness, an indissoluble suspicion that she herself may be stained or tainted:
somehow, at base, wrong.
How different was the experience of this lonely and anxious childwhose "mother tongue" was a scream followed by silencehow
different that was from the experience of the much-hovered-over child of that ex-English teacher and enthusiastic phrasemaker,
Mary Warner Moore. (If there is a synonym for "mother" it can only be "language.") Language, in the often impoverished
Moore household, lent gentility and special intimacy to life: words were exchanged, hoarded, treasured; spoken sentences were
long and periodic.
In "Efforts of Affection," Bishop rather wistfully recounts being told by Mrs. Moore how a litre cast-iron horse (then ensconced
in the Moores' bathroom) had occasioned one of the toddler Marianne's charming verbal exclamations. Marianne had dressed the
horse up in
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some lace at her Auntie Bee's house and had been scolded for it by her mother: "But the infant Marianne, the intrepid artist,
replied, 'Pretty looks, Ma! Pretty looks!'" Enviable and amazing this must have seemed to Bishop: over the years this mother had
kept tucked away, to be brought out on special occasions, the anecdote of her infant daughter's turn of phrase.
The close-knit family of three wrote letters when absences afforded, exchanging interesting or uplifting quotations, describing
and solidifying for one another their experiences in words. They even gave pet names to one another: "Rat" for Marianne,
"Badger" or "Weaz" ("Weasel") for John Warner, and ''Bunny," "Mole," or "Bear" for Mrs. Moore. Of most immediate
importance for Moore's poetry, Marianne kept "conversation notebooks" in which she hoarded nuggets of her mother's speech
for future occasions. Lamentably, the conversation notebook of 19211928 has been lost, but several of Mrs. Moore's highminded aphorisms from the 19351941 notebooks inform Moore's poems of the period (particularly, "In Distrust of Merits"):
"The dust of the earth that walks so arrogantly"; "Warthere is one answerthe warfare within"; "Faith is an affectionate thinga
patient thing."
In the terrains of language and of physical locale, then, we see Marianne Moore positioning herself in ongoing, affectionate, and
erudite conversation, attemptingevidently without resentmentto please, impress, and amuse the mother always with her,
observing too, over her shoulder. Elizabeth Bishop, in contrast, has to try to fill the linguistic vacuum bequeathed her by
mapping her observed islands of experience"their flora, / their fauna, their geography"to make them somehow more substantial,
more real. As Bishop reminds herself in her villanelle, "One Art": "It's evident / the art of losings not too hard to master /
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.'
This is perhaps the most elemental difference between these two gifted American women. Because their distinctions are so
many, it is time that each poet had a chapter of her own.
Jeredith Merrin
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Further Reading
Bishop, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Bishop: The Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, 19271979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.
Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Marianne Moore: Imaginary Posssessions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1989.
Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977.
May-Lombardi, Marilyn, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Merrin, Jeredith. "Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change." In Marilyn MayLombardi, ed., Elizabeth Bishop: The
Geography of Gender. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1990.
Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Moore, Marianne. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Macmillan/Viking, 1981.
The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Ed. Patricia C. Willis. New York: Viking, 1986.
Stapleton, Laurence. Marianne Moore: The Poet's Advance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
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Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (18791955) lived a life that was largely uneventful by ordinary standards. He was born in Reading,
Pennsylvania, the second of five children, three of whom would become lawyers like their father, Garrett Barcalow Stevens
(himself the son of a farmer). Not much is known of Stevens's mother, Margaretha Catharine Zeller, the daughter of a
shoemaker, who became, before her marriage, a teacher in the Reading schools; Stevens recalled her reading chapters of the
Bible aloud, and playing the piano and singing. He said of her "I am more like my mother than my father." Stevens's father,
though at first a successful businessman, eventually saw his businesses (a bicycle factory and a steel plano fail, and the decline
in his fortunes caused a nervous breakdown in 1901 from which he emerged a depleted man. Wallace Stevens, after completing
the classical course at Reading Boys' High School (where he won prizes), spent three years at Harvard as a special student.
There, he met the half-Spanish/half-American poet and philosopher George Santayana (then teaching philosophy at Harvard);
they exchanged poems, and Santayana became a lifelong model for Stevens of the possible cultural continuities between Europe
and America. At Harvard Stevens studied English, German, and French literature as well as medieval and Renaissance artall
interests he was to keep up during his life. He was elected president of The Harvard Advocate (the undergraduate literary
magazine), to which he had contributed several poems.
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"I am going to New York, I think, to try my hand at journalism," he wrote in his diary just before leaving Cambridge; his father
could not afford to pay for a fourth year in college, and Stevens was unwilling as yet to enter law school. But after a year of
working as a reporter for the New York Tribune, Stevens yielded (shocked, in part, by the depressing sights he saw in his
assignments), and entered New York Law School; in 1904 he was admitted to the New York State Bar. In the same year he met,
and began to court, a beautiful but uneducated young woman from Reading named Elsie Moll. Stevens's father bitterly
disapproved of the match, and he and his son broke off relations (the son no longer staying in his father's house on visits to
Reading); neither of Stevens's parents attended his wedding to Elsie in 1909, and he and his father never spoke again, though
after his father's death in 1911 Stevens visited his mother periodically till she died in 1912. In 1924 the Stevenses' one child, a
daughter named Holly, was born; Holly Stevens became the eventual editor of her father's journals and letters. The Stevenses'
marriage seems to have been an increasingly incompatible one; Holly Stevens believes her mother "suffered from a persecution
complex." The Stevenses did not entertain, and Elsie Stevens became a virtual recluse.
From 1904 to 1916 Stevens practiced law in New York; in 1916 he moved to Connecticut and joined the young Hartford
Accident and Indemnity Company, for which he worked as a surety lawyer (becoming eventually a vice president) until he died
in 1955. Though he did not cease to write poetry, and think about it, his first years as a lawyer, and even his early years with
the Hartford, when he was frequently on the road investigating surety claims, were ones of relatively scant output. During that
period he had literary acquaintances in New York City (among them, Marianne Moore and Alfred Kreymborg) and published
poems in journals, but it was not until he was almost forty-four that his first (and now famous) volume, Harmonium, was
published by Knopf (1923). A second, expanded edition was published in 1930; there followed the successive trade volumes
from Knopf, each of them marking a clear departure from what had gone before:
Ideas of Order (1935)
The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
Parts of a World (1942)
Transport to Summer (1947)
The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
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In 1954 Knopf issued the Collected Poems (which included a group of poems, entitled The Rock, written since the publication of
The Auroras of Autumn). The Collected Poems was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, shortly
before Stevens died of cancer. Stevens's daughter, who visited the hospital daily during his final tenday stay, "vigorously denies"
that he was converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed. (The Roman Catholic hospital chaplain reported in 1976more than
twenty years after Stevens's deaththat he had baptized Stevens, yet he could point to no record of the baptism, nor any
contemporary testimony to it, though Roman Catholic priests are required to record all baptisms.) Stevens had not been a
member of any church during his adult life.
Though Stevens's lectures and essays on poetry had been collected in 1951 in The Necessary Angel, after his death uncollected
poems and essays still remained, which were issued together, edited by Samuel French Morse, under the title Opus Posthumous
(1957; revised, amplified, and reedited in 1989 by Milton Bates). Letters, selected and edited by Holly Stevens, appeared in
1966; his youthful journal, edited with a commentary by Holly Stevens, came out in 1977 as Souvenirs and Prophecies: The
Young Wallace Stevens; and Stevens's commonplace book, Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects, edited by Milton Bates, appeared in
1989. The Huntington Library in California now owns most of the Stevens papers, including his voluminous genealogical
correspondence, as he attempted in later life, with professional help, to trace his Dutch ancestry.
Stevens is, in one sense, a very European poet. His poetry is intimately in touch with Latin ancestors (especially Virgil and
Lucretius), with Dante (from whom he derived his tercets), with French Modernist poets (especially Baudelaire, Valéry, and
Laforgue), and with British predecessors (notably Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Pater, and Yeats). His
connection with these writers is obvious in many of his themes but also strongly visible in his style, in, for instance, his constant
recourse to Latin etymologies and to French vocabulary and syntax, his inventive recreation of the English pentameter, his
rhapsodic rhetoric, and his lifelong modifications of European and English sonnet form. Stevens was bold enough to claim, in
his pensées collected under the Erasmian title "Adagia," that "French and English constitute a single language." He subscribed
to
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French periodicals and bought (sight unseen, from a Parisian dealer) French paintings.
And yet Stevens is, in both theme and style, a conspicuously and even outrageously American poet. Unlike his expatriate
contemporaries Eliot and Pound; unlike Williams, born of foreign parents and schooled in Switzerland; unlike even Frost, who
had to go to England to find poetic company and early publication, Stevens never went to Europe at all. The necessary
Americanness of American poetry was a constant preoccupation to Stevens, from the early "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring
Voyage" (1923) to the very late "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" (1955). Stevens interrogates the adequacy of America to
poetry and of poetry to America more often than any of his contemporaries except Williams, and spent more time walking the
American countryside and recording it than the other Modernists. Any comprehensive account of Stevens has to represent him
as a Euro-American poet interested in both the exotic and the native.
Stylistically, Stevens excels in vastly different styles, whether in short forms (the aphorism, the anecdote, the riddle, the enigma)
or in very long ones (the meditation, the topographical poem, the didactic poem). In this stylistic and formal variety he
resembles Wordsworth, whose lyrical ballads ("The Idiot Boy") so little resemble his Prelude that it is sometimes difficult to
believe they are both works of the same hand. The novice reader of Harmonium can scarcely conceive of "Bantams in Pine
Woods" and "Sunday Morning" as poems by one author; and although Stevens's style was to become more homogeneous with
the years, one finds even in The Rock distinct stylistic moments, ranging from the rapturous (''Night and its midnight-minting
fragrances") to the worldly ("St. Armorer's was once an immense success"), from the philosophical ("It is as if being was to be
observed") to the realistic ("The steeple at Farmington / Stands glistening"), from the blunt ("A scrawny cry from outside /
Seemed like a sound in his mind") to the naive ("Ariel was glad he had written his poems"). To read Stevens is to be trained by
him to read all his styles and all his genres.
Stevens is ranked high by his readers (and by his increasingly numerous commentators) for several different reasons. Though
nothing in his thought (which derives from William James, Santayana, Bergson, and
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Nietzsche, among others) is philosophically original, no modern poet has been better at reproducing in verse the way a
meditative mind movesinching forward, doubling back over its tracks, qualifying its original assertions, unfolding the ambiguity
and self-deception of its own phrases, querying its own results, mocking its own certainties. This seductive mimicry of the
thought process gives Stevens's long poems part of their enduring appeal. Stevens's firm positing of the constructive powers of
the imagination ("The only marvelous bishops of heaven have always been those that made it seem like heaven") countered by
an equally corrosive skepticism ("And yet what good were yesterday's devotions?" ["Montrachet-Le-Jardin"]) make him
attractive to historians of ideas in poetry, for whom he serves as an exemplar of the Modernist American questioning that
destroys (or at least deconstructs) the shakily balanced articles of Whitman's and Emerson's philosophic optimism. (Stevens's
own optimism is based on the renewing quality of destruction itself.)
Many readers find Stevens's (often deadpan) comedy irresistible. In life Stevens was often thought "sarcastic" by some of his
colleagues, who found his tendency to instant metaphorical caricature more than they could take; a sympathetic colleague,
Wilson Taylor, records Stevens's referring to a fellow lawyer as "having a smile that was like the silver plate on a coffin."
Stevens's other characteristic habit, especially in correspondence, was to firm almost at once the opposite of what he had just
written; once he had made a statement or advanced a proposition its converse seemed to him equally true. To some readers this
has seemed like teasing, or wanton insouciance. In poetry these same qualitiesfrequent and brilliant metaphor, frequent and
unsettling self-contradictionengender the comedy of his work. He is rarely without self-irony, and his self-metaphorsas the giant
in "The Plot Against the Giant," as the comic pilgrim Crispin of his early poetic autobiography "The Comedian as the Letter C,"
as "Professor Eucalyptus'' in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," as "Canon Aspirin" in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
and so onmock such aspects of himself as his large size (he may have suffered from acromegaly), his restlessness, his academic
tendency to the didactic, and his religious yearnings. The comedy of his work resides also in its linguistic brio, its affinity for
nonsense, and its gaiety ("Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language," he says in the "Adagia").
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Others read Stevens as a poet of the earth and its seasons; the seasons and the weather became for Stevens (who followed Keats
in this respect) all-purpose equivalents for the transcribing of emotion. His poems on spring (such as "Not Ideas About the
Thing But the Thing Itself"), on summer (especially the long poem "Credences of Summer"), on autumn ("The Auroras of
Autumn'' matching exactly its summer twin), and on winter (of which the most famous is "The Snow Man") are themselves a
compendium of American weather; and from the beginning he is intent to revise the Keatsian agricultural pastoral of lambs and
robins and wheat into an American poetry of deer, quail, and berries in the wilderness:
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness.
("Sunday Morning")
Stevens's wide poetic landscape extends from the sun, the morning star, and the moon through the aurora borealis to Mount
Chocorua; from the harvest fields in Pennsylvania to the Swatara river there; from "Hartford in a Purple Light" to "The River of
Rivers in Connecticut." As he said, he was a poet of "Local Objects""those few things / For which a fresh name always
occurred, as if / He wanted to make them, keep them from perishing." (As the last quotation shows, he preferred to write about
himself in the reticence of the third person.)
Still others read Stevens as a religious poet in search of a "supreme fiction" to replace the idea of God present in his
Presbyterian upbringing. "The death of one god is the death of all," he says in his "Adagia," and after abandoning his original
Christian faith Stevens came to see that, like all myths, it had been invented by the human imagination through poesis (which
for Stevens meant all our creative and constituting fictions and systems, whether of religion, law, social order, or domestic
arrangements). "This happy creature," Stevens says of the poet, "It is he that invented the Gods. It is he that put into their
mouths the only words they have ever spoken." Since "Christianity is an exhausted culture," it follows that "it is the belief and
not the god that counts," and that "the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing
else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." These
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axioms, and others like them, are rephrased in the poems: "Poetry / / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven
and its hymns," he wrote in "The Man with the Blue Guitar"; and he was to pursue this Arnoldian and Paterian project down
through the late essay "Two or Three Ideas'':
To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. . . . It was their
annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated. . . . At the same time, no
man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the
increasingly human self, . . . all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him
to resolve life and the world in his own terms.
Until recently Stevens was usually described as an apolitical poet, remote from the social realities of his era. In part this opinion
arose because Stevens himself omitted from his Collected Poems his single most socially oriented poem, a long sequence called
"Owl's Clover" (representing history, the owl of Minerva, flying among its "posies," the clover). This poem, composed during
the Depression, meditates on the value of art in a time of destitution, and the inevitable extinction of all cultures over time. The
notion of Stevens as a poet unconcerned with social reality also gained currency because Stevens was rarely a journalistically
topical poet; he seldom wrote directly about first-order events. Lately critics have been uncovering Stevens the poet of society,
who wrote not only about World War I ("Lettres d'un Soldat") and the Depression ("Mozart, 1935"), about the Italian invasion
of Ethiopia ("Owl's Clover") and World War II ("Examination of the Hero in Time of War"), about racial division in America
("The Sick Man") and American religious inheritance ("The Old Lutheran Bells at Home"), but who also wrote of gender
difference (Canon Aspirin and his sister), of troubled relations between the sexes (in a good deal of the earlier poetry), of
cultural desuetude ("Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "Description Without Place"), of totalitarian aesthetics ("Owl's Clover"),
of relativism of cultural value ("The Man on the Dump"), and so on. Stevens wrestled directly and continually in the twenties
and thirties with the journalistic and academic pressure on poets to write poems commenting openly on social and political
issues. In this respect Stevens's position places him between Eliot (who turned away from the role of engaged poet toward the
role of the Christian observer allying
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himself with monarchy and classicism) and overtly political poets like Pound and Auden, writing directly on political themes.
Though Stevens's poetry became less topical, understandably, as he aged, he never abandoned his interest in the pressure exerted
by factcurrent realityon the poetic imagination, and the counterpressure of the imagination pressing back:
The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on
everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to
be and to move quickly is overwhelming. Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone
is at least satisfied to have it be. (Opus Posthumous, p. 242)
Since this latter happy condition is never likely to occur, the imagination, against the unhappiness and dissatisfaction of every
day, continues to counter with its representations of a possible perfection:
There is still
The impossible possible philosophers' man,
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.
("Asides on the Oboe")
Of course one can understand representations of perfection only if one understands the negative of which they are the positive.
In that sense even Stevens's most idealistic moments can be read as a critique of his culture.
Stevens's idealism received its most acute wound neither from political chagrin, nor from religious disbelief, nor from cultural
relativism, but from erotic disappointment. The most powerful confirmation of his youthful tendency to idealize was his falling
in love with Elsie Moll, to whom, during the five years of their engagement, he wrote copious letters of devotion and
infatuation, and for whose sake he broke off relations with his father. A good part of his poetry treats the disillusion that
followed his marriage, first in such explicit poems as "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," "Red Loves Kit," "Good Man, Bad Woman,"
and ''The Woman Who Blamed Life on a Spaniard," and later in poems more abstracted from the immediate situation, such as
"World Without
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Peculiarity" and the first section of "The Rock." It was disillusion that first made Stevens see interior emotional conviction as a
form of madness; the disappearance of what one was sure was real (and had publicly confirmed by the act of marriage) made all
mental reality suspect. Stevens did not reattempt romantic love. Instead he scrutinized, relentlessly, the reality he had once
obscured by willful erotic blindness, until he could say, at seventy, in the poem "The Rock," that the biological imperative alone
could account for two young people rushing from their respective childhood homes to embrace passionately at the boundary of
marriage, their meeting
An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod
And another in a fantastic consciousness,
In a queer assertion of humanity:
A theorem proposed between the two
Two figures in a nature of the sun,
In the sun's design of its own happiness.
Although the Stevensian themes that I have been sketchingintellectual, pastoral, religious, topical, nativist, erotichave perhaps
drawn most of Stevens's readers to his work, readers are equally drawn (whether they realize it or not), by his exceedingly
original voice, conveyed through his many experiments in language. Some of those experiments are startling, as when the
clichéd "Arab moon" becomes "An Arabian in my room, / With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how, / Inscribes a primitive
astronomy" ("Notes"). Other experiments are rhythmical, and funny, like the address to the rooster in "Bantams in Pine Woods":
''Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan with caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!" But Stevens has serious voices as well as comic ones,
and his serious voices experiment chiefly with etymology, syntax, and registers of diction, so that Latinate and French-derived
and Anglo-Saxon words cohabit self-consciously rather than at random, the rhapsodic is astringently cut with the gnomic, and
the commonplace and the sublime and the banal all rub shoulders in the verse.
Because Stevens is so many-sided, and has attracted such different sorts of readers, he is variously represented by different
commentators. A deconstructionist critic will be interested in Stevens's anticipation of contemporary attention to absences,
negatives, gaps, contradictions, and ambiguities; a theorist may look at the tendency of Stevens's poet-
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ry to allegorize its own moves and place Stevens's essays on poetics in the line of Coleridge and Shelley; an Americanist will
focus on Stevens's inheritance from Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, William James, and Santayana; a genre critic will see
Stevens as a link in the history of lyric written in English, whether in England, America, or elsewhere; a historian of Modernism
will focus on Stevens as a representative of the twenties through the fifties (where Stevens is interestingly hard to place, as he is
successively Imagist, nativist, neoromantic, minimalist, and so on); a contemporary critic might want to see him as the precursor
of, e.g., Ashbery. In what follows I will be chiefly concerned with Stevens's lyric poetrythe work by which, after all, he is
rememberedrather than with Stevens as a philosopher, historian of his society, or theorist.
The first thing to say about Stevens's poetry is that it appeared late (1923) and flowered even later (the nineteen-forties, from his
sixtieth year on, was the period of his greatest productivity). Stevens had the extreme good luck to write powerfully and freshly
until a few months before his death. Perhaps because the bulk of his work was written in middle and old age, the typical Stevens
poem is not mimetic: that is, it does not relate a recognizable event of everyday human life. Normally, in reading lyric poetry,
we look for a first-order mimetic story"I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . / Till all at once I saw a crowd, / A host of golden
daffodils." Stevens rarely adopts this mode of lyric, perhaps because it so immediately recalls all the greater Romantic poems
("My heart aches," etc.) Instead, the typical Stevens poem will pitch its beginning in what is already a symbolic or parabolic
mode: a bantam rooster (an "inchling") will encounter in its path a much larger cock-rooster (a "ten-foot poet'') and will confront
him with the plucky but terrified rage of a minor artistic beginner coming up against a major "universal" chieftain of the tribe of
poets. The bantam-sentry stands his ground on his own turf, his pine woods, and cries out to his impressive threatener,
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.
Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.
("Bantams in Pine Woods")
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This shout of confrontation pits the lyric poem (regarded in nineteenth-century America as an effeminate genre suitable rather
for poetesses than for men) against the epic poemthat genre of "masculine" scope, of heroism, of characters larger than life-size.
Why would Stevens choose to represent the challenge of the lyric to the epic as a quarrel between a bantam and a full-size
rooster? Such a tactic can mislead even experienced readers; one academic critic has seen this poem as voiced by a bantam
rooster meeting the actual man Stevens in the woods: "'Fat! Fat!' he says to Stevens, who indeed had a bulky figure," concludes
this critic. To the contrary, Stevens identifies with the bantamone of his characteristically self-deprecating self-portraitstrying to
make his masculine stand on lyric, personal, ground. Stevens found the literal banal and boring; for him a poem became a poem
only by finding a symbolic figure for its predicament. "Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the
poem of the words" ("Adagia"). The poem of the idea is the symbol representing the idea, as the confrontation of bantam and
cockrooster is here the symbol of the idea of lyric confronting epic. Having found the poem of the idea, Stevens has to find the
poem of the words (here, the absurd rage-diction of the puny bantam). Every Stevens poem thus presents a double problem of
decoding; since the poem-of-the-words is appropriate to the poem of the idea (bantam-vs.-cock), one decodes the language to
find out what is going on between this bantam and this cock. Then one has to decide what is the idea of which bantam-vs.-cock
is the poem. Since the cock is a ten-foot poet and the bantam is an inchling, we have to think about big poets and little ones,
which translates reasonably enough into the conventional hierarchy of genres, in which epic traditionally dominated over lyric.
Another example. In a first-person, first-order Romantic lyric a poet might say (did say), "I die, I faint, I fail!" Such a poem
would convey directly, as a personal experience, terminal exhaustion, silence, and chill, and might of course illustrate its
feelings with simile or metaphor. Stevens will transfer such personal feelings onto a second-order symbolic landscape of broken
vegetation, in which a metaphor acts as reality:
In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks
Without legs, or for that, without heads.
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"Bad is final in this light," the poem asserts. Affixed to this secondorder, symbolic narrative is a third-order tide, one that
symbolizes, or sums up, the already symbolic story of the vegetation. The summary-title is a quotation (probably itself a
Southern dialect aphorism) from one of Stevens's friends, Judge Arthur Powell of Atlanta: "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters"the
epitome of a deprived time. The "low" diction of the third-order title is itself different from the wintry intelligence of the poem's
narrative diction, and neither one gives us the putafive first-order mimetic diction ("I fed broken; I feel mutilated; I feel even
decapitated") that we can intuit behind the second-order vegetation-narrative.
A survey of Stevens's titles, even in his first book, reveals how many of them are of this third-order sort, serving as a summary
or epitome of the concerns, literary or thematic, of the poems they head: "Earthy Anecdote," "Domination of Black," "Le
Monocle de Mon Oncle," "Metaphors of a Magnifico," "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges,''
"Fabliau of Florida." Explanation, theory, paraphrase, anatomysuch "literary" words keep turning up in Stevens's tides. This
suggests that for Stevens tides were a form of caption, seizing the whole in one glance. The tides are often genre analyses of the
poem that follows themthis is an anecdote, this is a tale, this is a soliloquy. Once Stevens had translated feeling into the poem of
the feeling ("the fiction that results from feeling," as he called it in "Notes"), he could invent a diction for his poem and write its
actual lines. But then, when he was done, he subjected the whole to an intellectual (and often ironic) appraisal, which generated
a literary evaluation of it and prompted its title.
This procedure has, understandably enough, been found off-putting by some readers. They see first the title, with its literary
allusion or its obliquity of reference, and think that since the title is devoid of "human interest" (unlike "The Solitary Reaper," or
"Upon Going to Bed," or even "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun") the poem itself is likely to lack human
reference as well. Next readers encounter a strange narrative about bantam roosters or the northern lights, often not even phrased
in the first-person singular. Worse, they may meet, skipping the title and starting directly with the poem, a creature from some
wholly unknown fable: "In Hydaspia, by Howzen, / Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen, / For whom what is was other things." And,
looking
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back to the title for help, readers in this instance find that the title is "Oak Leaves Are Hands"no help at all.
The reader trained on first-order mimetic lyric is at first at a loss in many of Stevens' poems. One way to become at home in
Stevens's world is to read his easier discursive poems, "The Idea of Order at Key West," for instance, which sufficiently
resembles its Romantic predecessors like "The Solitary Reaper," "The World Is Too Much with Us," and "Kubla Khan'' to make
the inexperienced reader feel at ease. Another way to become at home in Stevens's world is simply to immerse oneself within it,
since, as he himself said, "Each poem proves another and the whole" ("A Primitive Like an Orb"). Stevens's rule of thumb in
writing was that "the poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully" ("Man Carrying Thing"). In the "almost" lies his
concession.
Stevens's riddles of purport press his reader to notice the language of the poem, since it seems at first an obstacle to, rather than
a means of, import. The poem then becomesas any poem not dulled by over-familiarity shoulda friction of language into
iridescence, redeeming communication from the bland transparency of its everyday, information-retailing behavior. The modern
reader reads, in a practical sense, almost exclusively for information-retrieval; Stevens's aim is to retrain that reader into a
consciousness of the surface of language, that "visible core" (as Ashbery calls it) which by its manner suggests its depths.
At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense
stylization. The famous poem, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," resisted explication for some decades, perhaps because no one took
the trouble to deduce its implicit narrative from its stylized plot. (The Russian formalist distinction between "story" and "plot" is
often useful for this and other Stevens poems.) The basic "story" of "The Emperor" is that of a person who goes to the house of
a neighbor, a poor old woman, who has died; the person is to help "lay out" (arrange for decent viewing) the corpse in the
bedroom, while other neighbors are sending over homegrown flowers, and yet others are preparing food, including ice cream,
for the wake.
Stevens "plots" this story into two equal stanzas: one for the kitchen where the ice cream is being made, one for the bedroom
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where the corpse awaits decent covering. He "plots" it further by structuring the poem as a series of commands from an
unknown master of ceremonies, directingin a diction of extreme oddnessthe neighbors in their funeral duties: "Call the roller of
big cigars, / The muscular one, and bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. / . . . / / Take from the dresser . . . / . . .
that sheet/ . . . / And spread it so as to cover her face." Both the symbolic kitchen stanza (life as concupiscence) and the
symbolic bedroom stanza (death as final) end with the same third-order refrain echoed by the title: "The only emperor is the
emperor of ice-cream." Faced with life (however slovenly and appetitive) in the kitchen and death (with its protruding horny
feet) on the bed, one must, however unwillingly, acquiesce in the reign of life.
We cannot know what personal events prompted this 1922 poem, apparently set in Key West (so the poet Elizabeth Bishop
conjectured, who knew Key West, where Cubans worked at the machines in cigar factories, where blacks always had ice cream
at funerals), but it derives resonance from Stevens's mother's death ten years earlier. What is certain is that it represents
symbolically, with the Procrustean bed of its two rooms, the bitter moment of choosing life over death, at a time when life
seems particularly lonely, self-serving, lustful, and sordid. Art is exposed as too scanty in its powers to cover up death; the
embroidered sheet (a figure for the embellished page), if it is pulled up to cover the dead woman's face, reveals her "horny feet,"
which show "how cold she is, and dumb." In choosing to "let the lamp affix its beam," as in a morgue, and in acquiescing to the
command, ''Let be be finale of seem," Stevens makes his momentous choice for reality over appearance.
Besides their symbolism on the level of narrative imagerybantams, broken vegetation, ice creammost of Stevens's poems have a
symbolic structural architecture of the sort necessitating the two rooms ("stanzas") in "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." The
symbolic architecture is not always constructed solely by stanzas. Often another of Stevens's structural means is a variation in
the length of the sentences composing the poem. Here is one typical sentence pattern, that of the poem "Somnambulisma," an
eighteen-line poem of six tercets. The poem affirms that human beings come to feel at home in the indifferent physical universe
because poets (singer-scholars) acculturate them over the long
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periods of human history, giving them successive descriptions and systemizations of that universe. At first each poetic effort
seems ineffectual, personal, doomed to incompleteness and insufficiency, but then Stevens sees that the whole of the cultural
domestication of the universe is greater than the sum of its parts. In keeping with his democratic aims for art, he concludes that
the poet-scholar gives to human beings, as cultural clothing, not "regalia" suitable to Europe but "personalia" suitable to
America:
On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.
The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.
The generations of the bird are all
By water washed away. They follow after.
They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.
Without this bird that never settles, without
Its generations that follow in their universe,
The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore
Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,
In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.
The table below shows the number of lines occupied by each of the seven sentences of the poem and represents each tercet by a
roman numeral:
I.3 lines (the tercet = the sentence: the norm)
II.1 line
(the two sentences make up one tercet;
2 lines the tercet is still intact,end-stopped)
III.1 1/2
(the three sentences make up one tercet;
lines
1/2 line the middle sentence is the shortest in
1 line
the poem; the tercet, end-stopped, is still
intact)
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IVVI.9
(this sentence, the final one, occupies the
lines whole
second half of the poem, spreading over three
tercets,
which wash successively into each other)
This structure effectively divides the poem into two partsone nine-line part of many pauses, one nine-line part of no pausing. A
look at the first part shows three "feeble efforts" by the bird, which comprise a second overlaid structure on top of the structure
of end-stopped versus nonend-stopped tercets. In this second structure a three-line effort subsides into one line, a two-line effort
declines into a line and a half and then a half-line, and the final line in part I stops dead. This depressing series of feeble efforts
is "corrected" by the expansive exaltations of the nine-line sentence of part 2. The whole double patternof end-stopped versus
nonend-stopped tercets and of apparently unsuccessful attempts versus a re-reading of those attempts as cumulatively successful
(however partial each one)enacts, on the structural level, the import of the plot on the narrative level.
Stevens also "plots" his poems at the level of the syntax within each individual sentence, a syntax that is lavish in its use of
dependent clauses, appositives, and changes of tense and moodall of them means by which the narrative of the poem is
incrementally advanced, bit by bit. Stevens depends as well on a reader's knowledge of etymology, since much of his wordplay
depends on Latin roots (so that a root such as quaerere, to seek, is present for him in all his uses of its variants, including
inquire, quest, exquisite, perquisites, etc.) Stevens's frequent use, in his discursive mode, of compound Latinate words (transparent, a-spect, evoke, re-store, ex-temporize, in-tricate), demands that the reader give full force to both halves of the
etymology, as in the case of the word traverse, the operative word in the close of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven":
It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
Since Stevens liked to pun on words containing the syllable verse, such as universe, he expected the reader to notice that the
dynamic word here, tra-verse, standing for the energy we used to call that of the soul, contains the word for the poet's medium,
"the world in a verse" ("Arrival at the Waldorf"). What is the shade (ghost) that traverses a
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dust (pulvis es, homo) but the soul? What is the force that traverses that shade after death but its lingering spirit? One feels
Stevens's triumph in finding the word traversetrans-vertere, "to turn its way across, to plough a U-turned furrow"recalling, as it
does, the Latin origin in the act of ploughing of the very word for composition in metered lines, verse, and recalling as well his
early "blasphemous" American poem "Ploughing on Sunday":
Remus, blow your horn!
I'm ploughing on Sunday,
Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn!
In Stevens's first book, Harmonium, "Ploughing on Sunday," with its "primitive" language, was one of Stevens's first consciously
American poems. Blasphemy of the inherited Protestant pieties was one way for poets to be American, not English. "Some keep
the Sabbath going to Church" (wrote Emily Dickinson in her own blasphemous poem on Sunday morning) "I keep it, staying at
Home." Stevens's ''high" Harmonium poem on the same subject, "Sunday Morning," adopts a female persona, who repudiates
churchgoing in favor of staying home in her peignoir, having a late breakfast of "coffee and oranges" accompanied by her
cockatoo. (The lady probably derives from Monet's "Woman with a Parrot" in the Metropolitan MuseumMonet's woman is
wearing a peignoir, and has a parrot on a perch with orange peels at the bottom; to clinch the identification, she is wearing a
monocle on a cord around her neck, linking her to "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." Stevens was often inspired by paintings: "The
Man with the Blue Guitar" was prompted by a painting by Picasso, as the poem tells us, and no doubt other poems will
gradually be linked to paintings Stevens saw; in the Armory Show of 1913 there was a Hopper, now at the Carnegie Institute in
Pittsburgh, that may have inspired "Sailing After Lunch.") In revising his 1915 feminine Wordsworthian and Keatsian "Sunday
Morning" into his 1919 masculine and nativist "Ploughing on Sunday," Stevens acts out his own divided poetic loyalties. Much
of Harmonium can be seen as a quarrel between English euphony and American dissonance, European richesse (Botticelli's The
Birth of Venus in the Uffizi) and American insufficiency ("The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage"). The
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American "paltry nude" would like to be as splendid as the Renaissance Venus, but we have to take her as she is. She starts on a
spring voyage, yes,
But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
......................
She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms
Eventually, Stevens believed, "the goldener nude of a later day" would become visible, when America would have its own
Renaissance, finer than Florence's.
Stevens's Americanness is the burden of his 1922 manifesto in Harmonium, the comic spiritual autobiography in blank verse
called "The Comedian as the Letter C." In it his French protagonist Crispin quits Bordeaux (land of the troubadours, the
originators of modern lyric), tries out the Mexican tropics, but ends up in North America, believing in regional literature ("The
man in Georgia waking among pines / Should be pine-spokesman"), and settling down with a wife "and daughters with curls."
This satiric Browningesque narrative style (derived from "Sordello") never reappears in Stevens, but just as we can find almost
all of the later Keats in Endymion, so we can see in "The Comedian'' the seedbed for much of the later Stevens.
In the thirties, when Stevens confronted the extreme social conditions of a demoralized American capitalism, and felt the
powerful pressure of socialist imperatives in literature, he published in succession Ideas of Order (1935, in a limited edition),
Owl's Clover (1936, another limited edition), and The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937). These, and Parts of a World (1942, but
at least a third of it composed in the thirties), are the volumes most preoccupied with the social function of poetry. He said of
the first part of "Owl's Clover," "The subject I had in mind was the effect of the depression on the interest in art. . . . If I
dropped into a gallery, I found that I had no interest in what I saw. The air was charged with anxieties and tensions." Setting a
"noble" marble statue representing winged horses rising into the air (his symbol for Euro-American art) against a poor woman,
old, dressed in black (his symbol for destitution), Stevens confronted the apparent uselessness of fine art
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to those suffering from the Depression. He pursues the question into the mass art of Russian Socialist Realism ("Concerto for
Airplane and Pianoforte") and then into the cultural limits of Western art: "But could the statue stand in Africa?" The question
is finally referred to Necessity itself, which governs aesthetic production as it governs everything else in the universe; to it, all
cultural production is the same, equally favored: "The voice / In the jungle is a voice in Fontainebleau." Ananke, the Greek
tragic god of Necessity, determines cultural survival: "He, only, caused the statue to be made / And he shall fix the place where
it will stand.''
Stevens's later long poems have neither the autobiographical (if allegorical) narrative base of "The Comedian" nor the topical
base of "Owl's Clover." Instead, as their tides suggest, they are long meditations. "The Man with the Blue Guitar," because it is
suggested by a Picasso painting, adopts a folk persona and a "primitive" ballad form of tetrameter couplets. In its dialogue
between the guitarist and his audience it confronts the inevitable stylization of art with ordinary perceptions of reality:
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
As Stevens rings the changes on this theme through his thirty-three "takes" on the subject, he is continuing the aspectual method
of writing he had first proposed in his famous piece of Imagist chinoiserie, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Every
"way of looking" is another realityor, as the "Adagia" have it, "Things seen are things as seen." The later long sequences of the
forties"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "Esthétique du Mal," "Credences of Summer," "The Auroras of Autumn," and "An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven"ranging in length from ten to thirty-one linked cantos, are all aspectual poems, considering,
respectively, belief ("Notes"); evil and pain, both physical and spiritual (the mid-war "Esthétique"); the cycles of physical
fertility ("Summer"); the eventual destruction of all cultures ("Auroras"); and, finally, "not grim reality but reality grimly seen"
("An Ordinary Evening"). It should be recalled, when reading these sequences as when reading Eliot's Four Quartets, that they
were conceived and written dur-
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ing the cultural obliteration and human carnage of World War II. Stevens's inveterate belief in the necessary transformation of
the mimetic into the symbolic should not blind readers to the profound engagement of his poetry, especially in the long
sequences, with social and cultural suffering.
Stevens once wrote (in the essay "Three Academic Pieces") that poetry works by structural analogy: "The accuracy of accurate
letters is an accuracy with respect to the structure of reality" (italics mine)not a transcription of the events of reality, not a
journalistic fidelity to fact, but a symbolic analogy to the basic shapes of reality. Stevens's poetry reproduces, in his structures
(X-rays of reality), what he perceives to be reality's underlying structuresas we saw in ''The Emperor of Ice-Cream," with its two
symbolic rooms, or in "Somnambulisma," with its initially flagging efforts soaring into rejuvenating possibility. The long poems,
too, enact through their aspectual circumnavigation of a topic those rises and falls of feeling that we know from the greater
Romantic lyric. But where the Romantic lyric aims generally at some resolution of its convulsion of doubt or fear, Stevens aims
at a circular open-endedness, a dynamic interplay of polar opposites. A poem moves from its "ever-early candor" to its "late
plural" ("Notes") and then turns back to candor again. It needs both Alpha and Omega: "Alpha continues to begin. / Omega is
refreshed at every end" ("Ordinary Evening," VI). For this reason Stevens's poems need Alpha-passages of "primitive" or
"nonsensical" or "poor" vocabulary and also Omega-passages of Latinate, celebratory, highly evolved, hierophantic language.
He aims "to compound the imaginations Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima" ("Notes"); it is of course typical of
Stevens' humor that he should express the imaginations Latin in English and the common lingua franca in Latin (thereby
enacting linguistically his aim to "compound"make a compositeof them).
The long poems of the forties (with the partial exception of "Esthétique du Mal," which has some lyric sections) are all written
in the blank-verse line that Stevens perfected over his career, and which the contemporary poet Donald Justice has analyzed and
praised as a line genuinely responsive to American speech rhythms. Internal rhymes often connect successive lines of this blank
verse, and it is densely patterned by passages of parallel syntax. Stevens's pentameter could often
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accurately be called a trochaic rather than an iambic pentameter, since its rhythms are so frequently falling ones:
The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.
The robins are là-bas, the squirrels in tree-caves
Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.
In fact, the falling rhythms are often dactylic:
These are the edgings and inchings of final form,
The swarming activities of the formulae
Of statement.
This second passage suggests how Stevens's "pentameters," unlike those of his more regular predecessors in England and
America, often contain tetrameter fragments, speeding up the discursiveness of the poem, giving it a spoken irregularity, while
retaining a metrical rhythm. These keep the poem from the monotony he dreaded, from a one-tone-ness of mere didactic
instruction.
The long sequences are also enlivened by their frequent changes of lyric subgenre. Though "The Auroras of Autumn," for
example, is, taken as a whole, a lyric meditation on time's destructions, its subgenres include definition (I and VI), valediction
(IIIV), narration (V, IX), metaphysical query (VII), meditation (VIII), and exhortation (X). The long poems are also vivified by
a memorable series of allegorical personaeto name only some of those found in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Ozymandias and his spouse Nanzia Nunzio, Canon Aspirin, ''an Arabian in my room," "the MacCullough," major man, the old
seraph, the great statue of the General Du Puy, the planter who loved his island, the blue woman, a fallen head of a Central
American divinity, the "great captain and the maiden Bawda," and so on.
Stevens's long apprenticeship to the weather and the turning year underlies his late paired seasonal poems "Credences of
Summer" and "The Auroras of Autumn." Stevens liked the cusps of seasons, times like "the earliest ending of winter," moments
when "the last leaves that are going to fall have fallen." Such asymptotic rises and declensions represented for him "the
swarming activities of the formulae of statement, / Directly and indirectly getting at" reality. Since each formulation is an
approximation, one can never capture reality itself in language: it
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remains "the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X," the algebraic "unknown" ("The Motive for Metaphor").
Stevens's last years, during which he wrote the poems grouped under the title The Rock in the Collected Poems (and others
printed in Opus Posthumous) produced a sublime poetry of inception, newness, and freshness. Although there are poems about
decay and death, there are, equally, poems about the astonishing yearly self-renewal of the earth, about man's eye as the "silent
rhapsodist" of the planets ("The Rock"). Stevens perceives that at the very "antipodes of poetry" one becomes "a child again,"
and hears "the cricket of summer forming itself out of ice'' ("A Discovery of Thought"). The famous final soliloquy of his muse,
the "interior paramour," declares that "God and the imagination are one," but prefaces that declaration with the rhetorical phrase,
"We say," rendering the assertion a human locution rather than "the" truth. Stevens had in fact long ago emancipated himself
from the definite article attached to the word "truth": "It was when I said, / "There is no such thing as the truth,' / That the
grapes seemed fatter, / The fox ran out of his hole" ("On the Road Home"). Stevens's conviction that "the truth" did not exist as
such made him discover as his ideal form a sequence of improvisations, repetitions, variations, and anecdotes, each an aspectual
part of a truth. Any ideologue was, for him, like the Russian revolutionary Konstantinov"the lunatic of one idea / In a world of
ideas, who would have all the people / Live, work, suffer and die in that idea / In a world of ideas" ("Esthétique du Mal"). In
resisting the pressure toward ideological verse in the twenties and thirties, he found his own aspectual genius.
Stevens's reputation has grown steadily since his death in 1955, and his influence can be seen in the work of many subsequent
American poetsamong them A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Mark Strand, and Jorie Graham. What poets have
learned from Stevens is the importance of the metaphysical dimension in thought, and of symbolic construction in both imagery
and poetic architecture; the importance of syntax to argument; and the value of fable in lyric narrative. The narrow no-man'sland between regular and free verse has been explored more fully by Stevens than by any other Modernist poet except Eliot, and
writers retaining a musical connection with British prosody, while conscious of its necessary hybridization with American idiom
and intonation, find a pattern for study in Stevens.
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Stevens's remarks on the theory of poetry in such poems as "Of Modern Poetry" and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and
also in his essays, have yet to be fully absorbed. Their assertion of the immense social importance of the imagination is not yet
ratified in American culture. For Stevens ''the imagination" is the name we give to the human capacity to create new
systemsphilosophical, political, aesthetic, and domestic. The expressions of these systems (in texts, law codes, art works,
kinship structures, etc.) are a measure of the generatire fecundity of the imagination. Stevens was acutely conscious of
deficiencies in his own life (cf. "The Dwarf") and in the life of his society, of the poverty of our erotic imagination (our "paltry"
Venus), of the primitive ambition of our art (a gray and bare stoneware jar in lieu of Keats's ornamented marble urn), of our
economic failures ("Mozart, 1935"), and of the unbridged gap between the races, black and white. His "sick man" (in the late
poem of that rifle in Opus Posthumous), hears "in the South, bands of thousands of black men, / Playing mouth organs in the
night," and, equally, "Here in the North . . . voices of men, / Voices in chorus, singing without words." Both musical groups are
wordless; each has its own harmony. It is up to the sick man to wait for the "unison of the music of the drifting bands / And the
dissolving chorals," and in the meantime to imagine "the words of winter in which these two will come together." The sick man
will die, like Moses, in the wilderness, Stevens implies by the title of this poem of his seventieth year, but he will die "choosing
out of himself, out of everything within him / . . . / The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken," words of
a poetry that will hail and heal. The tuning is for the black bands, the singing is for the white chorus, the speaking is for the
aging poetthe words will make the three one. It is a utopian poem, written by a man who is sick with the sickness of his racially
divided country.
In a response to a 1946 questionnaire sent to him by the Yale Literary Magazine, Stevens wrote:
If people are to become dependent on poetry for any of the fundamental satisfactions, poetry must have an increasing
intellectual scope and power. This is a time for the highest poetry. We never understood the world less than we do now
nor, as we understand it, liked it less. We never wanted to understand it more nor needed to like it more. These are the
intense compulsions that challenge the poet as the appreciatory creator of values and beliefs.
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(Opus Posthumous, p. 311)
Stevens's own self-elegy, tacitly expressed in his elegy for Santayana, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," is based on Waller's
great poem of old age, "Of the Last Verses in the Book," which closes with these memorable images:
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
Stevens shows Santayana "On the threshold of heaven . . . / / The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome / Beyond, the
two alike in the make of the mind." Santayana's symbol is the light of a single candle"A light on the candle tearing against the
wick / To join a hovering excellence, to escape / From fire and be part only of that of which / / Fire is the symbol: the celestial
possible." Stevens, whether in his earliest hope to plough North America with verses or in his late hope, as the sick man, to join
the divided races with new words, remains a poet of that celestial possiblemany-faceted, irreducible, perennial.
Helen Vendler
Further Reading
Bates, Milton. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered. New York: Random House, 1983.
Cook, Eleanor. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Doggett, Frank, and Buttell, Robert, eds. Wallace Stevens: A Celebration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Leggett, B. J. Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
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Stevens, Holly. Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1955.
Letters. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966.
The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage, 1942.
Opus Posthumous. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984; repr. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1988.
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William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams's career as a published poet stretched from his first book of poems in 1909 until his final collection,
Pictures from Brueghel, in 1962. For most of those years he felt that his achievement, and his ideas on the necessary course for
American poetry in the twentieth century, languished in neglect. At the same time, he saw T. S. Eliot, a figure against whom he
came to define many of his own poetic concerns, winning fame, followers, and the most prestigious national and international
awards. In the last dozen years of his life, however, Williams not only received widespread recognition for his work, he became
something of a mentor to a number of the most important American poets of the 1950s. These poets looked to him as part of
their own search for alternatives to the prevailing mode of a complex, highly allusive poetics, as Williams had also looked for
an alternative to what he saw as Eliot's legacy. His friends and correspondents included Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert
Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov, all of whom responded in their own ways to what they learned from Williams the
man and Williams the poet.
In some ways Williams was very much a small-town figure. He was born, grew up, and died in Rutherford, New Jersey, a small
suburban town a twenty minutes' bus ride from New York City. His marriage of more than fifty years was to a local girl,
Florence (the Flossie of a number of poems). Rutherford and the surrounding towns supply many of the subjects for Williams's
verse and prose (he published four novels, a
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number of plays, and many essays, in addition to his poetry). The nearby city of Paterson provided the focus and the title of his
five-book long poem. A full-time pediatrician for forty years, Williams's medical practice took him into the homes of the local
people, from the poor Italian immigrants of nearby Guinea Hill, to the comfortable middle-class homeowners of Rutherford, and
into the hospitals of the nearby cities.
Yet the background to Williams's career in poetry was no more provincial than his medical training (he studied in Leipzig in
19091910). While attending the University of Pennsylvania from 19021906 for his medical degree, Williams formed close
friendships with Ezra Pound, H.D., and Charles Demuth. Pound proved a vital early contact, for once he had moved to London
he sent Williams useful advice and details of the latest literary journals and subsequently arranged for the publication of
Williams's early work. When Williams visited London in 1910 he met Yeats through his friend. Pound's international reach also
served to introduce Williams to some of the early Modernist poets in New York. Williams then began many years of using
Rutherford's proximity to the city to travel in frequently, keeping up with the latest developments within the writing and painting
communities.
This duality within Williams's biography feeds importantly into his work. In the world of Williams's poetry the technical
innovations and the insistence upon change and renewal fuse with the constants, of nature and its cycles and of the promise of
Americaburied, ignored, but ever a potential force. Also a constant presence in Williams's work are the energies of love and
sexual attraction. Marriage, for Williams, is the stable presence, always demanding renewal, even if through illicit sexual
encounters. The poet who lived and died in the same town expressed a fervent commitment to the localto the clear presentation
of what was under his nose and in front of his eyes. Stanza form was not to be dictated by tradition or by rules inherited from
other cultures but was to be shaped by engagement with the object. The language of the poem should be directwhat Williams
came to argue was the language and rhythm of American speech. But this commitment to the local was to be made with no
concession to provincial standards. The poetry of America must express the condition of the country, and thus would lack the
polish and completeness of poetry written in the European tradition, but this poetry should match the international standards of
Mod-
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ernist achievement. Thus, although Williams set himself against the international school of Eliot and PoundAmericans he felt
wrote about rootlessness and searched an alien past because of their failure to write about and live within their own culturehe
kept up with the latest books and journals coming out of the European centers, published a number of his own books in Europe
and his poems in European magazines, visited Europe again in 1924 for six months, and translated a French surrealist novel and
some major French poets.
The resulting tension, which gives a characteristic energy to Williams's poetry, is illustrated in the difficulty he had in entitling
his third book of poems. He was torn, he told Marianne Moore in a 1917 letter, between the Spanish title "Al Que Quiere!" (To
Him Who Wants It) and "The Pleasures of Democracy"between the uncompromising demands upon the audience made by the
Modernist and the desire to be a poet of the people. He wanted both titles, but settled for the former.
Twelve years before that third book, according to Williams's Autobiography (1951), the poetry he was writing while at college
was of two kinds: poetry influenced by Keats and poetry influenced by Whitman. This division between the work of tradition
and that of the iconoclast foreshadows Williams's later sense of the choices open to the contemporary American poet, but his
earliest extant pieces show him writing verses strongly influenced by the English poet.
In 1909 Williams gathered together some of his shorter poems and published his first book, Poems, printed, as were his next
four titles, at his own expense. The poems strike a tone of late Romantic weariness and a yearning for release from what the
poetic voice sees as the vulgar industrial world, thus mirroring many of the magazine poems of the day. In "The Uses of
Poetry," the only poem from the volume Williams allowed to be republished in his lifetime, the poet describes his "fond
anticipation of a day" when he can read "poesy to a ''lady . . . / The while we glide by many a leafy bay." As this poem has it,
through reading poetry "the door of sense" is closed and imagination takes flight away from the present world of "anguish."
"The Uses of Poetry" is characterized by everything the later Williams would spurn. A sonnet, it uses archaic poetic diction,
inversion, and rhyme, and argues that poetry aids the mind to escape the pressures of the present moment and the contemporary
world.
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Williams proudly sent a copy of his book to Pound in London, who bluntly replied that the poems were derivative and out-ofdate. Pound's letter included one of the many reading lists that Williams was to receive from his friend over the years (one of
which, forty years later, he would reproduce in Paterson). By 1949 Williams would feel that Pound could also learn something
from him. In 1909, however, he was glad of his friend's advice and even took it a little too much to heart. The poems in his next
book, The Tempers (1913), copy the style and tone of some of Pound's own experiments.
Williams did not reprint any of the 1909 Poems in his own collected volumes, and made clear that he did not ever want them
reprinted. The editors of Williams's Collected Poems (which appeared in two volumes, in 1986 and 1988) confined themselves
to including three, "The Uses of Poetry," and two that Reed Whittemore quoted in his 1975 biography William Carlos Williams:
Poet from Jersey. (Ironically, this most derivative of Williams's publications is the rarest book in the Williams's canon, a fire
having destroyed many of the unsold copies about ten years after publication. Only about a dozen of the books are known to
exist.)
In 1912 Pound arranged the first magazine publication of Williams's poetry, in London, where a year later The Tempers
appeared. In contrast to the earlier book, the poems contain a greater diversity of rhythm, some passionate emotion comes into
the address to the ever-present "lady," and the poet often takes up the world-weary tone of Pound's exiled troubadors. If the
modern world is still inadequate for poetry, the poet at least writes his lament from within it, and does not seek the escape
yearned for in "The Uses of Poetry." But within the book a few poems reveal the characteristic voice that Williams would go on
to develop. "Mezzo Forte" records a moment of exasperation with a cat, and "Hic Jacet" is a poem written out of Williams's
medical experience, noticing (although with a rather heavy irony) the prosperous condition of the coroner's "merry little
children.'' Williams also included translations of some Spanish ballads, the Spanishmaternalside of his heritage always serving
for Williams as a resource against the potential oppression of the English tradition, which he sometimes associates with his
English-born father.
A measure of Williams's development over the next twenty yearsbut also of the continuity of his interestscan be seen in a com-
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parison of the Tempers' translation of the Spanish ballad "Poplars of the meadow" with that in his 1936 book, Adam & Eve &
the City. For example, toward the end of the ballad, where the 1913 version has:
Since you are ware of my absence.
God, wilt Thou give me patience
Here while suffer I ye,
The 1936 version is more focused and economical, and the diction more contemporary:
When you discover my absence.
May God give me patience
Here in my misery,
The differences between the two versions stem from Williams's immediate and sustained interest in the ideas of Imagism
proposed by Pound in 1912 and 1913. But before Williams began what amounted to a career-long exploration of some of its
implications, he published in the London journal the Egoist a long poem titled "The Wanderer: A Rococo Study," which
revealed the disparity, at this time, between his ambitions and his ability to execute them. A poem of almost two hundred and
fifty lines, "The Wanderer" presents the concerns that were becoming central to Williams's poetics. Taking up a position "at the
prow" of the Manhattan ferry, the narrator asks himself: "How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?" Pushed to address this
question by an aged muse figure (whom Williams later said he modeled on his grandmother), the narrator at first seeks the kinds
of fanciful flights yearned for in "The Uses of Poetry.'' But the muse, who is presented in deliberately unidealist terms, forces
him to look carefully at what he sees before himincluding the hungry families waiting out the Paterson strike of 1913. The poet
now recognizes that he must commit himself to the close recording of the contemporary and the local, as it is, and not strained
through conceits that pretend a beauty where there is none. The muse figure conducts a mysterious ritual by the local river, "the
filthy Passaic," in which the poet's old self floats off downstream and the new self becomes a "wanderer," somewhat like
Thoreau, in his own locality, now open to the new and the actual.
"The Wanderer" is hardly the revolutionary poem its themes proclaim. Its narrator's position on a ferry is not its only borrowing
from
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Whitman, and the poem contains some of the poetic diction and inversions of Williams's earlier verse. Williams tried revising it
in 1917 for Al Que Quiere! but the poem remains more important as a manifesto than as an achievement. Yet "The Wanderer" is
a crucial work in Williams's career, as he recognized in putting the poem first in his 1951 Collected Earlier Poems. Williams
also often claimed the poem as the forerunner of Paterson, and quotes from it in the last, summary, pages of Paterson V.
Williams's poetry took a new direction in response to the discussions of Imagism, his exposure to these ideas was one of a
number of important influences upon him in the years immediately following The Tempers. Chief among these new contacts
was another connection supplied by Pound. Williams became a frequent visitor to the Grantwood, New Jersey, artists' colony,
which included among its group Alfred Kreymborg and Man Ray. Subsequently, Williams came to know a number of the avantgarde European artists working in New York to escape the war across the Atlantic.
A number of the strategies of Imagism, although early abandoned by Pound, appealed to Williams as a way to declare
independence from European conventions of style and to bring the American scene and the American voice into his work. The
three famous principles each had their appeal: direct treatment of the "thing," no superfluous language, and a demand for variety
of rhythms. The "thing" could be the American scene or object; the approach and presentation was key, not the intrinsic poetic
worth of the object treated. The contemporary American scene offered as rich a source of material as the time-honored
landscape of Europe. This principle was reinforced by Pound's insistence that the natural object should be the adequate symbol.
The coroner's children of ''Hic Jacet" deserved their place in a poem as much as the classical deifies who pepper many of the
poems in The Tempers.
The demand for economical language and a discarding of conventional rhythms could be claimed as the presentation of
American directness and could justify poems written without a bow to the traditions of genre. Whereas for Pound Imagism was
a declaration of independence from what he felt were the rhetorical and emotional excesses of Victorian verse, for Williams and
some other American poets it was a declaration of independence from the European tradition. In fact,
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Williams's own version of Imagism initially contains a high degree of emotional content. His next book, Al Que Quiere!, for
example, frequently exhorts his "townspeople" on the virtues of the commonplace in a style in which exclamation points do the
work that a crisp, inventive presentation of the object will achieve a few years later.
An associated aspect of the Imagist strategy reinforced Williams's developing concernsits claims for the temporal independence
of the image, and the poem. Pound argued that "an image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time," further distancing the demands of history and tradition from the poem. Williams wrote two longer poems in
these years, "History" and "March," which self-consciously recognize and present the achievements of past civilizations but end
with a demand that the poet create a new record from the American scene and moment. In ''History" the setting is the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and in "March" Williams's own memory of visiting in Europe the Assyrian
sculptures and the frescoes of Fra Angelico. The continuities of love and violence, death and faith, shape the thematic
connections within each poem, but the importance of the present need is finally emphasized. Whether that need is faced
courageously, with every acknowledgment of the destructive energies necessary for its expression, or is diffused through a
nostalgic return to the past that represses the claims of the present, becomes a central dialectic within Williams's important
historical essays in his In the American Grain (1925), and in his treatment of history in Paterson.
The temporal isolation of the image also allowed Williams to adopt a strategy common to much American literature, to both
expose and finally to discount the failures of the past to fulfill the promise of the American landscape and the American self.
This aspect of Williams's concerns reveals him as a quintessentially American exponent of Modernism, and marks his heritage
with Whitman just as much as their joint interest in technical innovation. (A number of critics have explored the relationship,
and Williams has also been discussed in the context of Emerson, and of the American poetic tradition generally.) Consistently in
Williams's work an oppressive ideology, a despair born of failure to meet expectations, the power of death itself, can be thrown
off as the key first step to the process of renewalwith every recogni-
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tion that the subsequent achievement will itself in turn have to be thrown off.
In his characteristic work, which begins with the poetry of Al Que Quiere! Williams's poetry is often concerned with beginnings,
but this is accompanied by a recognition of the deeply rooted continuities that for Williams lie beyond the restrictive cultural
connections with European tradition that he wishes to break. The often anthologized "Tract," while focused upon a funeral and
exhorting greater simplicity and concreteness within the ritual, is finally about preparation, a way to bring renewal out of loss,
and is also a recognition of a commonality. Many poems redefine traditional themes in contemporary terms. A number of poems
are titled "Pastoral," others describe dawn or a morning ritual, and still others explore the potential richness of a sexual
encounter. The opening prose of Spring and All (1923), a book that combines prose and poetry, imagines the destruction of a
world trapped by conventions, and creates through the imagination a climate within which its poems can ''enter the new world
naked," and the "black eyed susan" that is the focus of its final poem take root and bloom. The newness of the imagined world is
one with the cycles of nature.
This fundamental continuity, however, is only realized after a break from the superficial connections supplied by what for
Williams is a too prevalent, desperate adherence to convention. Thus he always emphasizes the danger inherent in breaking the
moment from its temporal flow, the break necessary to allow the moment its full expression within the poem. In Paterson the
spectacular Passaic Falls that are at the center of the poem are both the place of discovery and also the place of greatest
dangerthe "rock's / lip," where the waters gather and "leap to the conclusion and / fall, fall in air! as if / floating, relieved of
their weight, / split apart." On the level of technique the same emphasis appears in Williams's use of line and stanza breaks. The
word "edge" is a key one in Williams's poetics. The edge of the line, like the place of discovery that is the edge of the Falls,
breaks up expectations of the relationship of syntax and idea to the individual line, and to stanza form, as the poem moves down
the page.
By the time of his 1918 essay "Prologue to Kora in Hell," which introduced a book of prose improvisations, Williams had
started to find his own voice and to distance himself from Pound and from a number of other Modernist poets. The
improvisations themselves are a series of
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prose pieces Williams apparently wrote daily during the flu epidemic of 1917, coming home exhausted and writing whatever
came into his head. According to Williams's own account of writing Kora in Hell, he arranged the improvisations in a loose
order, and then wrote some commentaries upon them by way of attempted clarificationalthough some of the "clarifications" are
as dense and obscure as the passages they comment on.
Discussing the improvisations in Spring and All (1923), Williams conceded "their fault is their dislocation of sense, often
complete," but, as a number of critics have pointed out, the greater loosening of syntax that Williams allowed himself in these
prose pieces led to the poetry of his following books, Sour Grapes and Spring and All, having a new daring in their line breaks
and linguistic juxtapositions. The method also allowed him to practice his aesthetic of writing without a preconceived form and
under a pressure that demanded full attention only to the act of self-expression, without the intervention of expected norms of
mediation. In the 1928 prose and poetry sequence "The Descent of Winter," for a later example, Williams presents the work as
the notes of a diary, for a similar purpose, and in general a Williams poem strives for an effect of spontaneity as part of its
poetics of immediacy. The improvisations stand as his first full experiment with the possibilities of the strategy.
In the extended prose "Prologue" that introduces the improvisations, Williams sets himself against the international school then
emerging in the poetry of Pound and Eliot, with its emphasis on the place of tradition and the past in fully engaging the present.
In his witty and forceful essay, Williams declares that Eliot's poetry "is the latest touch from the literary cuisine, it adds to the
pleasant outlook from the club window." He terms Pound ''the best enemy United States verse has," and characterizes both as
"men content with the connotations of their mastees." He imagines "an international congress of poets" in Paris, and wonders
what the Frenchmen present would make of United States verse if Pound rose and read Eliot's "La Figlia Che Piange" as
representative American poetry.
In the essay Williams carves out his own position in the debate about the direction for Modernist poetry. Quoting from letters he
has received from the poets themselves, Williams disagrees with Wallace Stevens, asserting that multiple points of view within a
poem can more
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clearly bring out unseen characteristics of an object. He takes issue with H.D.'s claim that there is something "sacred" about the
creative impulse, and argues with Pound on the importance of the local in poetry. Williams agrees that no valuable alternative is
offered by the Chicago school of such poets as Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, but he presents as undertaking important
original work such painters as Marcel Duchamp and Wassily Kandinsky as well as his old friend Charles Demuth. Among
writers, Williams singles out for praise his associates Alfred Kreymborg and Maxwell Bodenheim, writers whom very few
would put above T. S. Eliot today. But whatever the essay's shortcomings as literary criticism, the "Prologue" remains central to
an understanding of Williams's position and the poetics he developed from it.
As Williams's discussion of painters in the "Prologue" indicates, as he started to find his own voice his poetry came to have an
increasingly visual orientation. A Williams poem often became one that had to be seen on the page, as well as read, a
characteristic that Williams could particularly exploit by composing most of his poems directly onto the typewriter. Some of this
visual impetus reflects the pictorial aspects of Imagism, although some critics have suggested that Williams's diagnostic methods
as a doctor would also have contributed to the appeal.
Equally crucial to the increasing emphasis upon the visual in Williams's work was the achievement of the Modernist painters in
finding a vocabulary of revolt against the kind of conventions that Williams wanted to take on. Pound had recognized in his
Imagist manifestoes that poetry was behind painting in its discovery of a contemporary form and language. Among the European
artists in New York for the duration of the war, Williams found a general spirit of iconoclasm, and, as the "Prologue" indicates,
he was particularly interested in the work of Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamp challenged some fundamental assumptions about the relationship of an artist to a work of art, and in the "Prologue"
Williams argues for the importance of Duchamp's ideas. He notes that Duchamp at one point declared that his composition for
that day would be the first thing he saw upon entering a hardware store. Bringing back a snow shovel (Williams remembers it as
a pick-ax) Duchamp hung it in his studio as his work In Advance of the Broken Arm. The strategy matches Williams's attempt to
engage the object
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world without preconceptions and to incorporate the world of objectstransformed by the creative will of the artist, a force that
Williams came to term "imagination"into his work. Paterson would include such objects as the drilling record of an artesian
well, letters sent to the poet, and extracts from New Jersey histories and newspapers.
Williams also recounts Duchamp taking a full-size photograph of his famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, touching it
up with a little paint, and declaring it a new composition. Such an action parallels Williams's emphasis upon technique being the
important part of a poems meaning, and offered reading experience, rather than what the poem is "about." And Duchamp's
action also, as with the snow shovel example, returns the authority of compositional decisions to the artist, and away from the
conventional expectations of an audience.
What critics have come to call the "visual text" of a Williams poem appears in his work in a number of ways. In Williams's
more reflective, memory-oriented poetry of the 1950s, the poems are structured around a triadic line spaced across the page
from left to right. The three-step line visually reflects the descent into the self and the store of experience being reencountered
that is the theme of the poems. At other times, most often in the 1930s, Williams makes the fide of a poem also function as the
first line, a visual effect that has to be seen on the page.
Sometimes Williams incorporates the language and appearance of signs into his poems. In the 1923 poem "Rapid Transit," from
Spring and All, some of the poem's language is apparently taken from a highway campaign and a subway poster, among other
sources:
Careful Crossing Campaign
Cross Crossings Cautiously
THE HORSES
PRANCED
black
&
white
Outings in New York City
In this extract, what set of verbal relationships are to be given priority in a reading, those running downwards or across? The
relationships are as much visual as semantic, and Williams builds the cross-cutting tensions of the two into the poem. The
device further demonstrates the way that this poetics of immediacy must finally be multidirectional, the
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fullness of its engagement with and exploration of the moment not compromised by a linearity associated with the temporal. "I
ascend" Williams writes in another poem from Spring and All, "and at the same time / I descend."
The multidirectionality and nonlinguistic reach of Williams's use of signs are part of his attempt to, as Kenneth Burke noticed in
an early review, dissolve the space between subject and object. (Williams titled a poetry journal he coedited in the early 1920s
Contact.) In "The Attic Which is Desire:" Williams reproduces the commercial sign he can see from the attic study in which he
is writing his poem:
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
S
O
D
A
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
In "April" the objects are even further removed from the linguistic, the poem incorporating a skull and crossbones and two
arrows, signs encountered at a hospital. One page of Paterson, in Book III, where thematically a flood is occurring, consists of
fragments of sentences from many sourcesoverheard speech, books, Williams's own verseeach moving in a different direction
across and up and down the page.
Williams wants the object world to enter the poem with a minimum degree of mediation from language or from the structure of
the poem itselfalthough he is always aware that a poem is a linguistic construction. The attempt of the poem to minimize this
meditation is another of the creative tensions within a Williams poem. In a 1931 essay on Marianne Moore, which, like much of
Williams's criticism, is most helpful for revealing his own concerns, Williams praises his friend for "wiping soiled words or
cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts."
Thus, in one well-known example, a poem from Spring and All later titled "The Rose," Williams examines the rose's renewed
possibilities for composition once the familiar associations of love have been removed, uncovering ''the fragility of the flower /
unbruised."
Williams's poetry seeks to tie the word anew to the object, as part of his insistence that the object be seen and described as it
actually is. Williams's concern can be illustrated with an example he used to intro-
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duce a 1934 essay on Alfred Stieglitz, whose championing of American art Williams admired. The first settlers, Williams
recounts, "saw birds with rusty breasts and called them robins." But the birds are thrushes, only faintly resembling the English
bird of the same name. The example serves for Williams to demonstrate a lack of looking carefully, a nostalgia for what has
been left behind, and a careless use of language. For Williams the first settlers, and too many American writers and readers
since, have lacked the courage to face and recognize the new.
Williams's work of the 1920s reflects his continuing concern to delineate his relationship both to Europe and to his own culture.
The end of the First World War saw the return of the European artists to France, to be followed by many American writers and
artists attracted by the favorable exchange rates. Williams's resulting sense of isolation was compounded by the international
success of The Waste Land in 1922, which he later termed "the great catastrophe to our letters," and argued "gave the poem back
to the academics." In his letters to Pound Williams occasionally confessed to a temptation to join the expatriates, fired as he
sometimes was of his neglect, and what he saw as the provincialism of the American audience. On a leave of absence from his
medical practice he and Florence Williams visited Europe in 1924 for six months, and Williams's first novel A Voyage to
Pagany (1928) illustrates his coming to terms with European achievement, through the thinly disguised autobiographical
protagonist Dr. Dev Evans. The novel ends with the confrontation producing another of Williams's characteristic renewals, as
the returning doctor views the Nantucket shore in the distance, again a pioneer: "So this is the beginning.''
Lacking a regular publisher for his work in the United States in the 1920s, Williams was obliged to publish two books of prose
and poetry arrangements, Spring and All and "The Descent of Winter," in limited editions in Europe. Neither book was reprinted
in its original format in Williams's lifetime, although Williams did reprint most of the poetry. The unavailability of these
textswhich some critics feel contain Williams's finest writinghelps explain Williams's late recognition as a major Modernist poet,
and also explains why most of the earliest scholarly discussions, in the 1950s and 1960s, were of the more readily available
Paterson, and the work of the 1950s. When J. Hillis Miller wanted to discuss the Spring and All prose in his important essay in
Poets of Reality (1965), he had to return to one of the only three hundred copies of the book printed to find the text.
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Both books were reprinted in their original form in Imaginations (1970), and also in the Collected Poems: Volume I, but many
readers still only know such famous poems from Spring and All as "The Red Wheelbarrow," "To Elsie," and "Spring and All''
("By the road to the contagious hospital") as isolated anthology pieces. To read the poems in the full context of the twentyseven poems and thematically related prose is to see Williams working to develop a poetics that, while still retaining a sharpness
of pictorial immediacy, transcended the structural limitations of the short lyric.
In the "Prologue to Kora in Hell" Williams argued that a "loose linking of one thing with another has effects of a destructive
power little to be guessed at." In addition to thematic connections one way this "loose linking" governs the arrangement of the
Spring and All poems is through their titles being merely numbers"IXXVII." The device also ensures that the poems are read
within the context of the arrangement and the world of imagination that the book's opening pages present, rather than through
the expectations raised by a title. The book's prose arguments have their own dynamic, and are rarely presented logically. A
sentence is as likely to suddenly stop with a dash or just blank spacesometimes after one wordas to complete the idea it had
started to express. A poetics of immediacy will always seek to short-circuit analytical thought. Williams wants the self to engage
the object world through a descent into the kind of preconscious energies that, for him, lie within the body, beneath the
constructs of the mind and the logic of conventional discourse.
In "The Descent of Winter" the poems are also numbered. The numerical titles serve as dated journal entries, as the sequence
moves from 9/27 to 12/18. The prose, as well as continuing the discussion of poetics, describes the people and landscape of the
New Jersey towns of Williams's medical practice, while the poems, too, are largely concerned with local scenes. The poems are
much more emotionally austere than those of Spring and All, matching the bareness of the landscape and the season that
nevertheless serves the poet as the material of his art. Williams originally conceived "The Descent of Winter" as the first half of
a book that would in its second half record the renewal of spring through the poetry and prose of "Della Primavera Trasportata
al Morale" (Springtime translated to a moral). But he eventually separated the two and published the later sequence as ten poems
without prose some years later.
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In a 1925 book of essays entitled In the American Grain, which provides a helpful gloss on the poet's view of history in his
poetry, Williams turned his attention to the schoolroom figures of American history. He searched for what he felt was the truth
of such men as Columbus, Washington, Franklin, and Boone beneath the welter of legend and myth that had come to surround
them. The figures are examined in terms of their commitment to, or rejection of, the rich possibilities of the New World. Using
one of a variety of techniques for each essay, including straightforward quotation from documents, an invented monologue, or a
discussion with a French critic, Williams rewrites history in his own terms. The inventiveness and sensitivity of Montezuma is
destroyed by the Spanish. De Soto responds to the promise of the New World despite himselfits lure presented as a sexual
invitation inevitable and ultimately destructive, for him, in its fulfillment. Boone resists the temptations of civilization, and
understands the violence of the Indians, even toward his own family. Burr's attempt to bring about real change is thwarted by the
totalitarian designs of Hamilton, and the false myths that cover their clash. The Puritans deny the sensual in themselves and
attempt to repress it in others. A particularly important chapter for understanding the role of violence and the subconscious in
Williams's poetry is his chapter on Poe. Williams sees Poe as a realist, and his tortured characters as representing the hell of